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THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


THE GREEK TRADITION 


FROM THE DEATH OF SOCRATES TO THE COUNCIL 
OF CHALCEDON 


(399 B. C. ro 451 A. D.) 


INTRODUCTION: PLATONISM 
VOLUME I. THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


THE RELIGION OF 
PLATO 


BY 


PAUL ELMER MORE 


AUTHOR OF “‘SHELBURNE ESSAYS”? 


PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 
PRINCETON 


LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD 
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


1921 


Copyright, 1921, by 
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS 


Published, 1921 
Printed in the United States of America 


PAs) 





PREFACE 


In the Preface to my Platonism I said that 
my purpose in publishing that work was to lay 
the foundation for a series of studies on the or- 
igins and early environment of Christianity and 
on various modern revivals of philosophic re- 
ligion. Four years have passed since those lec- 
tures were delivered and printed, and the project 
which then stood rather vaguely before me has 
taken more definite shape. My plan now is that 
the series—or better, perhaps, the core of the 
series—should consist of four volumes. Of these 
the first is presented herewith; the second will 
deal with the Hellenistic philosophies, principally 
Epicureanism, Stoicism, and Neoplatonism; the 
third will be on Christianity, and the fourth will 
contain a number of essays on fundamental ques- 
tions raised in the course of the foregoing studies. 

As I have already observed, and may have to 
observe again, my intention is not at all to com- 
pose a history of Greek philosophy or of Chris- 
tian dogma; the work in these fields has been done 
thoroughly and repeatedly. Nor am I concerned 
with ultimate origins. No doubt, to take the 
present volume, an exposition of Plato’s sources 
would be interesting and would throw a clarifying 

Wi 


= £* ay 
= RF uF & 


Vi PREFACE 


light on some of his religious ideas; but this field 
also has been well covered, notably by Erwin 
Rohde. ‘Somewhere one must start, some re- 
striction one must accept; and the inclusions and 
limitations imposed on the task here begun are 
determined by the fact that it is undertaken with 
a very definite thesis in view. Just what that 
thesis is it may be well to state at the outset in the 
fewest possible words. 

My belief then is that Greek literatur e, philo- 
sophie and religious, pagan and Christian, from 
Plato to St. Chrysostom and beyond that to the 
Council of Chalcedon in 451 A. D., is essentially 
a unit and follows at the centre a straight line. 
This body of thought I call the Greek Tradition, 
since the main force in preserving it intact while 
assimilating large accretions of foreign matter 
was the extraordinary genius of the Greek speech. 
The initial impulse to the movement was given 
by a peculiar form of dualism developed by Plato 
from the teaching of his master Socrates. ‘The 
ereat Hellenistic philosophies—Epicurean, Stoic, 
and Neoplatonic—were attempts, each on a dif- 
ferent line, to reconcile the dualistic inconsistency 
in the nature of things, as we know them, by 
forcing our experience into the Procrustean bed 
of reason. And each of these philosophies, it may 
be said here, by its rationalistic rejection of the 
paradox in the nature of things only succeeded at | 


PREFACE vil 


the last in falling into grosser paradoxes of logic 
and ethics. Christianity, on the contrary, not- 
withstanding its importation of a powerful for- 
eign element into the tradition, and despite the 
disturbance of its metaphysical theology, was 
the true heir and developer of Platonism, truer 
than any of the pagan philosophies. And by 
the side of the orthodox faith, as set forth in the 
Creed of Nicea and the Definition of Chalcedon, 
there ran a succession of heresies which endeay- 
oured, each again on its own line, to reconcile the 
paradox of the two natures and one person of 
Christ by methods curiously resembling the mon- 
istic rationalism of the heretical philosophies, if 
I may so call them. 

It is this tradition, Platonic and Christian at 
the centre, this realization of an immaterial life, 
once felt by the Greek soul and wrought into the 
texture of the Greek language, that lies behind 
all our western philosophy and religion. With- 
out it, so far as I can see, we should have re- 
mained barbarians; and, losing it, so far as I 
can see, we are in peril of sinking back into bar- 
barism. Unfortunately the direct tradition 
passed in the East into the keeping of a people 
who had no strength of heart and mind to main- 
tain it, and, roughly speaking, with the death of 
Chrysostom, the virtue had at last gone out of it; 
then Greece came to an end. But in the West 


vill PREFACE 


the tradition met a different fate. There it was 
taken up by a people of stronger nerve, who 
showed in religion the same faculty of assimila- 
tion as they had shown in pure literature, and 
who passed the inheritance on to the vigorous 
young races of the North. 

Yet if the Latin genius assimilated much, it 
also adapted; and the tradition, as it comes to 
us through this medium, assumed a new éthos 
at the first, and in the centuries since the separa- 
tion of East and West it has received accretions 
which threaten the integrity of its foundation. I 
do not mean that religion has gained nothing by 
its transmission through the Latin mind; a cer- 
tain note of character and worldly wisdom it 
wanted, and these Rome and her heirs could give. 
Nor would I belittle the intellectual achievement 
of the great doctors of the western Church and 
the western schools in the Middle Ages and since 
the Renaissance. But withal I am convinced that 
in certain important matters the Latin, and I may 
add the Teutonic, mode of thought has perverted 
the stream of philosophy and religion, and that 
the need of the modern world becomes daily more 
urgent to make a return to the purer source of 
our spiritual life. This does not imply that we 
should forget all the secular learning of the inter- 
vening ages, or that we should cease to be our- 
selves, if that were possible; but it does recognize 


PREFACE ix 


in the Greek Tradition something which we must 
recover if religion is not to disappear and leave 
our existence dismally impoverished, something 
without which our wisdom may become vanity 
and our science a bondage. ‘We now are turn- 
ing,” says Dr. Foakes Jackson in his History of 
the Christian Church, “from the great men whose 
writings made the Christianity of the Middle 
Ages and of the Reformation, from St. Augus- 
tine and St. Thomas Aquinas, from Luther and 
Calvin, to the Greek thinkers, St. Athanasius, 
St. Gregory of Nyssa, and St. Cyril, to help the 
religious difficulties of a scientific age.” I would 
broaden Dr. Jackson’s statement by regarding 
this eastward movement as the culmination of a 
half-conscious tendency of the English Church 
from the time of the Reformation; and I should 
like to modify it by including Plato with the 
masters of eastern theology. 

The volume now offered, as I have said, is the 
first of four which are designed to constitute a 
single connected treatise. The preceding volume, 
Platonism, may be taken as an introduction to 
the series, and in the main it fulfills that office 
suitably enough; but, owing to the fact that when 
it was written the larger project of the series was 
not clearly formed, some things are included in it 
which belong more properly to the body of the 
work, and some things are omitted which might 


Xs PREFACE 


naturally be expected in an introduction. That 
must be my apology if any reader is annoyed 
by what may seem unnecessary repetitions in 
these two books on Plato. 

The narrowing of time and the chances of life 
are a warning that I should be well content if 
these four volumes, which I have called the core 
of the series, are brought to completion. But 
still “a dream cometh through the multitude of 
business,” and a man’s “heart taketh not rest in 
the night”—which, the Preacher adds, “is also 
vanity.” Already other subjects, on the fringe of 
the projected circle, are pressing upon my atten- 
tion. A volume on the tragedians would offer 
an opportunity to fill out the background to 
Plato’s religious ideas; a special study of Clement 
of Alexandria, with translations of passages from 
his works duly selected and arranged, would 
elucidate the relations of Platonism and Chris- 
tianity; essays on the Cambridge Platonists and 
the Tractarians of Oxford might furnish an in- 
teresting illustration of the never fully realized 
trend of Anglican thought. But these things lie 
on the lap of the gods; and now I remember the 
prayer of Marcus Aurelius: “The work of phi- 
losophy is simple and modest, let me not be drawn 
away into vain pomp of words.” 

As a control upon the discussion of the various 
aspects of Plato’s religion, it has seemed advisable 


PREFACE xl 


that the reader should have actually before him 
a translation of the passage on which in each case 
the argument is chiefly based. Thus chapter ii, 
introducing the topic of philosophy, gives the 
hypothetical paragraphs of the second book of 
The Republic; chapter iv contains the theological 
excursus that forms the tenth book of the Laws; 
chapter vii epitomizes the myth of creation from 
the Timaeus; and chapter x is from the general 
preamble in the fourth and fifth books of the 
Laws, dealing with worship and the religious life. 
If there is a more heart-breaking task than the 
attempt to convert Plato’s Greek into English, I 
do not know it, and any one who has tried his 
hand thereat will understand my regret that it 
was not permissible to print from Jowett or some 
other of the standard translations. As it is, I 
have borrowed words and phrases pretty freely 
from my predecessors. In general my version 
follows the original closely. The only liberty I 
have allowed myself is to omit, without indica- 
tion, the scattered bits of talk that break the con- 
tinued flow of the argument, or, in a few cases, 
to incorporate a question or reply into the main 
discourse. This procedure has involved the oc- 
casional neglect of a term of address. Omissions 
of a larger nature are indicated. 

In conclusion a sentence or two regarding the 
footnotes. Some of these, more indeed than I 


Xil PREFACE 


like, are controversial. They must be excused 
by the necessity, as I am bound to see it, of clear- 
ing Platonism of the false metaphysical interpre- 
tations that have been clustering about it -since 
the days of the so-called Neoplatonists. As for 
the rest of the notes their aim, when not mere 
references, is to keep constantly in view the main 
thesis of this book as a member of the series, viz. 
that the religion of Plato is not an isolated phe- 
nomenon but an integral part of the great Tra- 
dition. It may be that I should have attained 
my object better if the quotations in the notes 
also had been turned into English; but some- 
thing, I felt, ought to be conceded to those readers 
who cherish the speech of Plato and Paul and 
Chrysostom, and for other readers the sight of 
the unfamiliar letters may serve as a provocative 
reminder that our spiritual and intellectual in- 
heritance is still intrinsically Greek. 
iP. BM 
Princeton, N. J., 
May 381, 1921. 


CONTENTS 


PAGE 
_ 5-1 ad a a Re ae SE RE ne Nr orn Vv 
I. The Components of Religion ..... 1 

_ Il. Translation from The Republic, 
BO ete ohare nin oni id oat 22 
III. Philosophy: Justice and the Soul.. 37 
iV. ‘Translation of Laws Xo ese en 75 
V. Theology: The Being of God..... 107 


VI. Theology: Providence and Justice. 137 

v VII. Translation from the Timaeus.... 167 
VVIII. Mythology: The Creation ....... 198 
IX. Mythology: The Problem of Evil. 232 
X. Translation from Laws IV and V. 262 


Mel. “Religious! Lifes: Worship. .:..<:.'. 278 
XII. Religious Life: The Ideal World. 309 
PEMD BING INES PM 25 1, Sn tel Scrat kite, ota eke tel els 340 
[AEE DREN PINI Ee! 20ers Goede ce d/o. sos ee ofa 0's B45 


RPBESOIEME gr Ein te ey ea cel negt 350 





THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


CHAPTER f 
THE COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 


The subject of the present volume is the re- 
ligion of Plato as part of a great spiritual ad- 
venture of the ancient world from the death of 
Socrates to the Council of Chalcedon just eight 
centuries and a half later. This movement, 
despite large importations from without, was es- 
sentially a product of the Hellenic mind; but its 
record comes to us in two languages, Greek and 
Latin, whose genius was strikingly different. 
One of the peculiarities of the Greek tongue is 
its richness in distinctions where often it lacks 
terms to gather these distinctions under a com- 
mon head. And nowhere is this peculiarity more 
marked than in the subject we have to consider; 
for, strange as it may seem, Greek has no ex- 
pression for the general idea conveyed by the 
word “religion,” which we take from the Latin. 
The nearest approach to it perhaps is eusebeia, or 
theosebeia; but the meaning of these terms is 
rather “piety,” an aspect of religion, than religion 
in the more comprehensive sense. No word, or 

1 


2 + ‘THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


combination of words, can be found in the lan- 
guage of Epicurus, or of Plato and St. Athana- 
sius, to carry the exact equivalent of “religion” 
in the tremendous line of the Epicurean poet of 
Rome: T'antum religio potuit suadere malorum. 
On the other hand it is equally true that Latin, 
strong in generalizations but poor in distinctions, 
had no native resource for discriminating the 
main components of what is really a complex 
phenomenon, and for terms to designate these 
was obliged to borrow from its sister speech. If 
“religion” is Latin, “philosophy” and “theology” 
and “mythology” are Greek. 

Now this linguistic difference corresponds to 
a deep-seated divergence in ways of thinking. 
That is not to say that the Latin mind was totally 
incapable of analysis; Latin did in fact adopt 
the Greek terminology for the various com- 
ponents of religion, and so handed them on to us. 
Nor does it follow that, because the Greek lan- 
guage possessed no definite term for religion, 
therefore the Hellenic mind was completely in- 
sensible to the generalization lying behind diver- 
sity. Such an inference would be unwarranted, 
for an idea may be operative although there be 
no single word available to express it. But it is 
_ true that these traits of the Latin and the Greek 
languages are indicative of an original bias or 
emphasis in the mind and temper of the two 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 3 


peoples, and that a language tends to preserve 
such a bias or emphasis among its inheritors. We 
can see this in the fact that, even apart from other 
modifications introduced by the temper of Rome, 
primitive Christianity as it is presented in the 
Latin Fathers gives the impression of an unana- 
lysed experience of the whole soul, whereas in the 
Greek Fathers it is comparatively easy to keep in 
view the strands of which that experience is com- 
posed. Undoubtedly, so far as religion is a mat- 
ter of character and the will, it happens that 
power has been transmitted with the Latin unity 
of conception; but it is at least a question whether 
such gain in power has not been at the expense of 
clear thinking.* The driving force of religion 
would seem to be connected with something un- 
analysable at its heart; its surest defence against 
critical attack, on the contrary, may be found in 
a more intellectual comprehension of its struc- 
ture. And so, in an age of sceptical criticism, if 
we care to recover our inheritance of faith, it may 


1An illustration of the danger inherent in this tendency to 
generalize without regard to distinctions may be found in the 
authorized version of James i, 27: “Pure religion and undefiled 
before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and 
widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from 
the world.” St. James is defining thréskeia, “religious worship or 
usage,” which is not coterminous with the Latin religio; and to 
take his words as a definition of religion in toto, as they are 
often taken today, leads to a deplorable impoverishment of the 
spiritual life. 


4 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


be advisable to look beyond the Latin sources, 
on which our western world has mainly depended, 
to the Hellenistic Fathers of the Church, and be- 
yond them to the earlier thinkers of Athens, to 
Plato first of all. By this process we may be able 
to get a clearer understanding of what is univer- 
sally valid in religious experience, and to separate 
the deciduous overgrowth from what is still of 
vital importance for us in the Greek Tradition. 

In the following chapters I propose to study 
the religion of Plato first under the three aspects 
of philosophy and theology and mythology, and 
then as a composite whole; but as a preliminary 
it may be well to take a hasty survey of the 
changing fortune of these terms in the course of 
their ancient history. 

It is natural that philosophy, as standing for 
what was most presumptuously Hellenic and 
pagan, should have had the most diversified 
career. Among classical writers, from the begin- 
ning or from a very early period, the word ac- 
quired a double sense, practical and theoretic. At 
one time it might denote merely an unreasoned 
discipline or way of life, as, for example, in the 
speech composed by Lysias to be spoken by an 
uneducated cripple before the Senate of Athens: 
“For this, I think, is the aim and philosophy of 
all the afflicted, that they may live under their 
misfortune with as little discomfort as possible.’” 

2For the Cripple 10. 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 5 


Between this ethical use of the word and its 
higher, more theoretical sense the interval is 
bridged over by such a thought as the following 
from Marcus Aurelius: “What then can help 
us on our way? One thing, and one alone, phi- 
losophy; which is to keep the spirit within us 
(ton endon daimona) inviolate and free from 
scathe.”* From this it is an easy step to Plato’s 
consummation of wisdom in self-knowledge, and 
to that “philosophy of the soul” which is a recog- 
nition of its diviner potentiality. 

The mediator between classical and Christian 
writers was Philo the Jew, a contemporary of 
Jesus, who made it the business of his life to 
reinterpret the Mosaic scriptures in the terms of 
Platonic Idealism, yet would not hesitate on oc- 
casion to speak slightingly, even contemptuously, 
of Plato in his desire to establish religion on a 
basis other than merely human wisdom.* To 
Philo, the Hebrew mystics of his own day were in 
possession of a higher truth than the wisest of the 
gentiles had been able to reach by means of their 
uninspired philosophy. As secular studies con- 

3 Meditations ii, 17. 

4See particularly, in his De Vita Contemplativa (which with 
Conybeare I hold to be authentic), the account of the life of 
study and fasting led by the sect of Therapeutae in Egypt, and 
the contrast he draws between their modest Sabbathday 


pannychides and the banquets of the Greeks as described in the 
Symposia of Plato and Xenophon. 


Republic 
61le 


6 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


tribute to the acquisition of philosophy, whose 
servants they are, so, he says, philosophy is but 
the contributary and handmaid of that divine 
wisdom (sophia) with which religion really be- 
gins. Philosophy, for purely human reasons, 
may teach the control of the passions and the gov- 
ernance of the tongue, and these indeed are de- 
sirable in themselves, but they become a more 
solemn and holy matter when practised for the 
honour and good pleasure of God.° 

To the earliest Christian writers, the so-called 
Apostolic Fathers, philosophy was virtually non- 
existent. Their immediate successors, upon 
whom first fell the task of justifying the faith 
intellectually, were in too precarious a position 
to make concessions to their most dangerous 
rivals, and among the Apologists of the middle 
decades of the second century the prevailing note 
is hatred and abuse of Greek philosophy.’ Justin 
is more generous than the others; but the real 
change comes with Clement of Alexandria, whose 
life-work in the Christian field was much like 
that of Philo in the Jewish, an effort to enrich 
religion with the spoils of Platonic Idealism 


& De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia 79.—Yet elsewhere, notably in 
the De Vita Contemplativa, 7 matpios diAocodia is for him the 
purest wisdom of religion. All these words are used now loosely, 
and now strictly. 

6 See, for instance, Tatian §§2, 25, 32; Athenagoras 11; Theo- 
philus of Antioch iii, 3-8. 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION y 


while still maintaining that revelation had 
brought a higher kind of wisdom to mankind. 
In his use of the word philosophy Clement is not 
consistent. Sometimes it designates for him a 
merely negative training in logic which will en- 
able the believer to expose the errors of a hostile 
sophistry; at other times it is a moral discipline, 
chastening the will and preparing the heart for 
the reception of truth; while again it is adopted 
boldly as a synonym for the revealed truth.’ But 
in the main Clement follows the Philonic scheme 
of a progress from secular studies to philosophy 
and from this to divine wisdom,* although his 
sophia has acquired a more definite content than 
the Jew’s, being now the perfect and self-suf- 
ficient doctrine of the Word, the power and wis- 
dom of God displayed in the economy of salva- 
tion.” 

Later, when their rivals have been beaten from 
the field and are no longer a serious menace, the 
Doctors of the Church can afford to forget the 
appropriation of the word philosophy to pagan 


7 Stromata I, xx, 100; xvi, 80; xxviii, 177; xxix, 182; ef passim. 

8 See, for example, Stromata I, v, 30, where he simply para- 
phrases the passage of Philo’s De Cong. Er. noted above. Origen 
has expressed the same notion, Philocalia xii, 1: “Iv,’ dmep Gavi 
piiocdduv maides wept yewuerpias Kal pwovorkis, ypappatixys TE 
kal pytopixys Kal dotpovopias, as ovvepibwv dirocodia, rovd” 
Hpeis eirwpev Kal repli aitas pirocodias mpos xploTiaviopov. 

9 Stromata I, xx, 100. 


8 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


wisdom, and do not hesitate to usurp it for their 
special vocabulary. Thus, for instance, a popular 
moralist like Chrysostom can appeal to the phi- 
losophy of a mixed congregation almost in the 
manner of a Lysias addressing the Senate of 
Athens, while a theorist such as Gregory of Nyssa 
feels no need to apologize or explain when he re- 
fers to the whole Christian éthos as a “high phi- 
losophy.”*® The word, in its progress among 
Christian writers from neglect to hostility, from 
hostility to condescension, and from condescen- 
sion to lordly appropriation, has come a complete 
circle. Philosophy is no longer a humble prepara- 
tion for a higher form of wisdom, as it was in 
Philo and, at times, in Clement, but is itself the 
norm of conduct and the supreme wisdom; it is 
not contrary to religion, but a part or aspect of 
religion. Yet still with this difference which 
clings to it from its long history, that in Chris- 
tianity the perception of truth has become secon- 
dary to and dependent upon theological and 
mythological dogma, whereas to the pagan it was 
primary and free. This similarity and distinction 
will grow clearer, I trust, as we proceed. 
Meanwhile, before passing to the other con- 
stituents of religion, it is important to observe a 


10 For examples of this sliding use of the word see Chrysostom, 
In Mat. 186p, 187p, 190c, 2358, 2388, 252p, 273c, 3284, In Phil. 211p; 
Gregory, Cat. Or. 18 (with Srawley’s note). 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 9 


further distinction. In both the classical and the 
late Christian writers the word philosophy, as we 
have seen, had a double application. At one time 
it was taken ethically, or practically, to designate 
a certain self-mastery in conduct, while at another 
time its sense is intellectual and seems to rise into 
the region of pure intuition. The point I would 
make is that no real inconsistency exists in this 
double aspect of the word, and that even when 
most theoretical philosophy still retains, in proper 
usage, something of its simpler, practical value; 
it implies always theory as concerned with actual 
life and as resting on a definite experience of the 
soul. In this way philosophy, as a study of the 
deeper and more inward facts of consciousness, 
was rightly contrasted with those encyclical, or 
secular, studies (grammar, rhetoric, mathematics, 
music, etc.) which are its handmaids; and, as still 
pragmatic in its method, it was distinguished with 
equal propriety, though perhaps not with equal 
regularity, from those bastard overgrowths of 
eristic, or metaphysics, which are its most inveter- 
ate enemies for the very reason that they so subtly 
resemble it. 

In close connexion with the passage in which 
Philo sets forth the friendly place of philosophy 
between secular studies and the wisdom (sophia) 
that looks to the honour of God, he states in 
strong language the irreconcilable difference be- 


10 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


tween true philosophy and the abuse of reason to 
which the name metaphysics may be restricted: 

‘““As among physicians the so-called word-cure 
offers no help for the sick—for diseases are cured 
by medicine and surgery and diet, but not by 
words—so in philosophy there are mere word- 
dealers and word-catchers, who have no will or 
skill to heal the life filled with ailments, but from 
early youth to extreme old age are not ashamed 
to squabble over opinions and syllables, as if hap- 
piness lay in the endless and idle pursuit of terms, 
and not in improving character as the source of 
human life.”’* 


The same condemnation of the logomachy of 
metaphysics, as a caricature of genuine philoso- 
phy, is one of the constant topics of the later 
Christian philosophers. Clement of Alexandria 
returns to it again and again.” Gregory of Nazi- 
anzus puts the case bluntly in the introduction to 
his Theological Orations: “On what subjects 
and how far should we philosophize? On those 
subjects that are within our reach, and as far 
as the mental state and faculty of the hearer 
ean follow.” 'The whole trend of his argument 
shows how clearly he saw that the dead hand of 


11 De Cong. Er. 53. “Word-cure,” oyiatpeia. I do not know 
to what particular sect of faith-healers the title is applied. But 
the term is not quite clearly defined by Liddell and Scott as 
associated with Galen’s )oyiatpos, “a physician only in words,” 
See Galen III, 145; VIII, 670. 

12, g. Stromata V, i, 5-7. 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 11 


metaphysics takes hold of the mind only when 
the soul has lost its birthright of self-knowledge 
and is driven to chase shadows in place of sub- 
stances. He would have subscribed heartily to 
the saying of a modern divine who, like Milton, 
had “some not insignificant taste for the sweet- 
ness of philosophy,” and was also well versed in 
the long vexations of metaphysical debate: “The 
genuine ground of all communion with the infin- 
ite having sunk away within us, all sorts of logical 
proofs, and logical disproofs, will quarrel to- 
gether about primitive certainties that shroud 
themselves from both.’ 

There is no serious difficulty in keeping the 
sphere of philosophy separate in our mind from 
the other two components of religion, and, so 
far as it is a matter of mere terminology, there 
would be no harm in emphasizing this separation 
by limiting the word religion to designate the 
sphere of theology and mythology taken together 
as distinct from philosophy. ‘That indeed was 
the actual usage of many Greek writers, and we 
too may find it convenient at times to employ 
philosophy and religion, after the manner of 
Philo, in this contrasted sense. It is a fact to be 
remembered also that philosophy, so understood, 
may be even antagonistic to religion. But gen- 
erally, in the present volume at least, I propose 

13 James Martineau, Essays I, 268.—See Appendix A. 


12 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


to take religion in its broader scope as embracing 
philosophy as well as theology and mythology. 
These terms have a way now of gliding one into 
the other, and now of standing apart, as do the 
subjects they connote. 

By theology I mean, as its etymology implies, 
the science of God, the consideration of His na- 
ture in itself. Here again we have to face the 
fact that the terminology at our command is a 
part of the popular language, and as such is 
commonly used without technical precision. 
Theology is often extended to include a contem- 
plative, even a metaphysical, study of the whole 
field of the divine activity, and the poverty and 
fluidity of our vocabulary may justify on occa- 
sion this more general use of the word. But for 
the purpose in hand we have a right to limit its 
meaning to that part of religious theory which 
Gregory of Nazianzus had in mind when he gave 
to his orations against the Eunomians the dis- 
tinctive title of Theological. His subject matter, 
with insignificant deviations, is strictly that to 
which I have limited theology in my definition, 
that is, the being and nature of God, here re- 
garded, as would be inevitable with a Christian, 
in relation to the question of the Trinity as one 
Deity subsisting in three persons. And it is note- 
worthy that in his effort to unravel the perplex- 
ities of this paradox, Gregory, while never for a 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 13 


moment obliterating the boundaries between phi- 
losophy and theology, does not disdain to fall 
back upon the procedure and theorems of philoso- 
phy to elucidate his theology. So in his most 
eloquent passage on the divine vision, admitting 
that all we can see of God is only as it were 
the back parts, as beheld by Moses on Mount 
Sinai—only the indications of Himself which He 
has left behind Him in the wonder and majesty 
of the created world—confessing that the reve- 
lation of God as Father, Son, and Spirit is no 
more than a clumsy translation into human 
speech of truths that surpass human understand- 
ing, Gregory compares the theologian who would 
approach Deity to the philosopher in Plato’s al- 
legory of the cave, who, brought from darkness 
face to face with the celestial world of Ideas, 
cannot endure to raise his eyes forthright to their 
ineffable glory, but must lower his gaze to their 
shadowy images and reflections.“ The ascent 
of philosophy and theology are thus, in Gregory’s 
mind, parallel and may be taken one to illustrate 
the other; but their goal and object are not the 
same: one ends in the vision of the eternal Ideas, 
the other looks to the knowledge of God. Re- 
ligion should embrace both. 

Theology and mythology, especially in the 
Christian scheme, are never far apart, and in their 

14 Or, Theol. ii, 3. 


14 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


confines actually merge together. The ground 
on which they meet is the question of Providence. 
In its more general aspect, however, Providence, 
as an expression of the power and wisdom and 
justice of God Himself, would properly come 
under the range of theology; and so, as we shall 
see, it was treated by Plato. In Christianity the 
classification is complicated by the double role of 
one of the persons of the Trinity. Considered in 
relation to the Logos as creator and governor of 
the world, Providence remains fairly within the 
competence of theology; but as carried out in the 
plan of salvation by the condescension of the 
Logos to human nature and His reassumption of 
human nature into deity it falls more specifically 
under the head of mythology. For mythology is 
just that part of religion which is concerned with 
the intermingling of the divine and the human 
spheres of being, whether made manifest by the 
appearance of the gods among men, or looked 
for in the extension of man’s life into the world 
of the gods. 

As for the word mythology, we must admit 
that it is totally rejected by the Christians, and 
this for the obvious reason that it would seem 
to place the Incarnation on the same level with 
such myths of Greece as the amorous exploits of 
Zeus among the daughters of men and the 
scarcely less decorous adventures of Apollo, and 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 15 


would assimilate the terrors of the judgment day 
to the pains of Sisyphus in Hades and the 
pleasures of the heroes in the islands of the Hes- 
perides.*” Instead therefore of regarding the In- 
carnation as a myth they preferred to speak of 
it as the “economy,” that is as God’s particular 
management of the human race so as to raise it 
from its fallen estate; while to the judgment of 
mankind at the divine tribunal and its conse- 
quences they gave the name of “eschatology,” the 
science of the last things. If in our handling of 
this department of religion we recur to the clas- 
sical usage, it is because we have no better term 
than myth to include the intermingling of the 
two worlds whether exemplified in the doings of 
the pagan gods, or in Plato’s allegory of creation 
and future judgment, or in the Christian econo- 
my and eschatology. But we would adopt the 
word without prejudice. Because the unsavoury 
escapades of a pagan god are called myths, it does 
not follow that any disrespect is intended to the 
incarnation of Christ by treating it also under 
the head of mythology. A myth may be false 
and silly; it may be the veil, more or less trans- 
parent, of sublime truth. 

For the connexion of theology with mythology 
and the distinction between them in Christian 
literature one may refer to the Catechetical Ora- 

15 Justin Martyr, Apology I, liv. 


16 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


tion of Gregory of Nyssa, which is virtually con- 
temporaneous with the Theological Orations of 
the other Gregory.” Of the forty chapters com- 
posing the work of the Nyssean the first four are 
theological, discussing in briefest terms the being 
and nature of God as displayed in the Trinity. 
The next four chapters deal with the more gen- 
eral question of Providence as involved in the 
creation of man and the origin of evil; they serve 
as a transition from the theological introduction 
to the mythological argument (chapters 1x-xl) 
which occupies the remainder of the book. 'To 
the narrowly orthodox this part of the work has 
not been entirely acceptable, as showing traces 
of the suspected doctrines of Origen. 'To the 
less sensitive reader it may appeal as one of the 
greater products of the Greek religious imagina- 
tion, confused perhaps here and there in its logic 
(some groping is almost inherent in the nature of 
the subject matter), yet on the whole presenting 
the act of God’s self-abasement to humanity and 
the consequent restoration of humanity to its di- 
vine perfection in the form of a stirring spiritual 
drama. It is the sublimation of mythology; for 
mythology, in the end, cannot be defined better 
than as the drama of religion. 

16 Another illustration may be found in the Contra Gentiles 


and the De Incarnatione of Athanasius. The first is theology, 
the second mythology. 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 17 


Enough has been said, I trust, to show how 
the analytical view of religion, as composed of 
philosophy and theology and mythology, was 
common to the Greek writers, both pagan and 
Christian, from Plato to St. Chrysostom. The 
elements remain the same; but it is true also that 
as we pass from pagan to Christian the order of 
assurance and of temporal acquisition among 
these elements undergoes a complete reversion, 
and that the lesson we take to ourselves will de- 
pend on our attitude towards what is no less than 
a revolution within the circle of the Greek Tradi- 
tion. To the pagan, particularly the Platonist, 
philosophy was the dominating element; here was 
the starting point of religion and the sphere of 
whatever certainty is attainable by man; here he 
thought he was dealing with facts and was stand- 
ing on a foundation of proved knowledge. In 
theology he believed he was still close to ascer- 
tainable truth, yet removed a step from the re- 
gion of immediate experience. Mythology car- 
ried him further afield from positive assurance, 
though it might be indispensable as the ex- 
pression, more or less symbolical, of necessary 
truths. The enlightened pagan might repudiate 
as vigorously as the Christian the popular tales 
of the gods, but, if he was humble as well as en- 
lightened, he would continue to admit that only 
through myth, purified of its extravagance, could 


18 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


he lay hold of that enigmatical intercourse be- 
tween the human and the divine on which the 
vigour of the religious life is largely dependent. 
Perhaps no pagan understood this function of 
the imagination better than Maximus of Tyre, a 
preacher of Platonism in the days of Commodus. 
“All things,” he says, “are full of mystery 
(ainigmatén), both in the poets and in the [an- 
cient] philosophers. And for my part I like 
rather their spirit of reverence towards the truth 
than the boldness of the moderns. For of mat- 
ters dimly perceived by human weakness the more 
becoming interpreter is mythology.’ 

The mind of the Christian moved in the oppo- 
site direction. With him, so long at least as he 
remained orthodox, what the pagan called myth- 
ology was the starting point of religion and the 
field of certainty. The incarnation, with the 
whole economy of salvation, he regarded as a 
verifiable historical event, in which the imagina- 
tion had no part; unless this fact were nakedly 
and objectively true his faith was vain and his 
preaching a lie. Symbolism for him entered with 
theology; and though he might be ready to perish 
for his conception of the Trinity, he would not 
deny that his terms for the relation of the three 
persons one to another were an inadequate trans- 
lation into human speech of truths that surpassed 


17 Philosophoumena iv, 5a. 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 19 


mortal comprehension. In a way his theological 
definitions were admittedly more symbolical than 
the Platonist’s. ‘The divergence becomes again 
complete when we pass to philosophy. Here, 
where the Platonist thought he could move se- 
curely if anywhere, the Christian, so far as he 
distinguished philosophy from revelation, saw 
only the blind groping of a ruined intelligence, 
which, unaided by divine Grace, might catch a 
glimpse, afar off and shrouded in clouds and thick 
darkness, of its true home, but in the end must 
sink into doubt and despair. 

The full significance of this revolution of direc- 
tion within what is essentially the same circle of 
religious experience will be better understood 
after we have completed our examination of Pla- 
tonism and Christianity. For the present some 
intimation of its nature may be conveyed by set- 
ting side by side certain words of Socrates and 
a passage from one of the Fathers. “A life with- 
out criticism, or reflection on its meaning, is un- 
worthy of a man,” says Socrates in the Apology ; 
and more than once he declares that the only 
thing worth while is to pass one’s days conversing 
about the great problems of conduct and dis- 
cussing the definitions of good and evil. This is 
the approach to religion by way of philosophy; it 
was Plato’s way. With it may be compared a 
characteristic saying of St. Basil in one of his let- 


38a 


20 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ters: “For if to live for us is Christ, it follows 
that our conversation ought to be about Christ, 
our thought and our conduct should hang upon 
his commands and our soul should be formed in 
his likeness.”** That is the mythological ap- 
proach to religion, the way of the Christian. 
How conscious the ancient writers themselves 
were of the diversity of the two ways, we may 
learn from the common accusation brought 
against the Christians that their rule was, “Do not 
investigate, only believe.” Origen, who quotes 
the charge and comments on it,”’, could indeed 
show by way of retort that the pagan philosopher 
also was impelled to his initial choice of philoso- 
phy by something resembling an unreasoning act 
of faith. His reply would have been more ef- 
fective here, if, as in many other passages of his 
works, he had insisted that at least the Platonist 
among pagans and the Christian, though starting 
from opposite poles and moving in contrary di- 
rections, were still traversing the same road 
through the same broad land of religious faith. 

Our present purpose is to examine the attitude 
of Plato to the three components of religion. It 

18 Epistola clix (Migne). 

19 Philocalia xviii, 1 (Contra Celsum i, 9): My éé€érale, adda 
miotevoov. See Greg. Thaum., In Orig. 14, for the application of 


this to Origen’s method of teaching. Socrates had said, Apology 
38a: “O d€ avefétactos Bios 0d Biwros avOpurw. 


COMPONENTS OF RELIGION 21 


will appear that not the smallest of his merits as 
a religious writer is the clearness with which he 
holds to the distinction between philosophy and 
theology, and between theology and mythology, 
while at the same time he sees how they flow one 
into the other to form a single body of spiritual 


life. 


358B 


CHAPTER II 


PHILOSOPHY 
TRANSLATION FROM THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 


[ The first book of The Republic had been con- 
cerned mainly with a refutation of the Nietz- 
schean theory upheld by Thrasymachus, that nat- 
ural justice is merely the right of the stronger to 
grasp what he can. In the opening paragraphs 
of the second book, which here follow in transla- 
tion, the central thesis of the whole dialogue is set 
forth by Glaucon and Adeimantus, the young 
brothers of Plato, who demand from Socrates a 
positive exposition of his own creed that it is 
better, under all circumstances, to be just than to 
be unjust. ] 


Glauco loquitur: I wish now you would listen 
to me too, and see whether you agree with me. 
For in my opinion Thrasymachus succumbed to 
you, like a charmed snake, sooner than he ought, 
and your demonstration of justice and injustice 
does not yet satisfy my mind. I desire still to 
hear what they actually are and how they operate 
in the soul, each considered by itself and with no 
regard to its rewards and results. With your 
consent, therefore, I will proceed thus: taking up 

22 


THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 23 


the argument from the point of view of Thrasy- 
machus, first I shall state the nature and origin 
of justice in accordance with the views of these 
men; secondly, I shall show that all those who 
practise justice, practise it as a necessity, not as a 
good, and, thirdly, I shall contend that their 
attitude is reasonable, since, as they say, the life 
of the unjust is far preferable to the life of the 
just. Not, of course, that this is my own view; 
but I am perplexed by the words of Thrasy- 
machus and a thousand others dinning in my 
ears, whereas to the present time I have never 
heard from any one the argument that shows how 
justice is preferable to injustice, as I should like 
to hear it—an encomium of justice, I mean, 
stripped of every accessory—and as I expect to 
hear it from you by your leave. To this end I 
shall exert myself to laud the unjust life, and my 
manner of speaking will show you how I wish to 
hear you censuring injustice and praising justice. 

Now they say that in the nature of things to do 
injustice is a good and to suffer injustice is an 
evil, but that there is more of evil in suffering in- 
justice than of good in doing it, and so when in- 
justice is done and suffered and men have had a 
taste of both, those who are unable to escape the 
evil and take the good conclude that it is better 
to come to an understanding which shall put an 
end to one and the other. Hence the beginning of 


359 


Q4 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


laws and mutual covenants; hence that which the 
law ordains gets. the name of lawful and just [as 
distinguished from what is just by nature], and 
this is the origin and essence of [so-called] jus- 
tice, a compromise between the best state, where- 
in aman should do injustice without punishment, 
and the worst state, wherein he should suffer in- 
justice without power to retaliate. And the just 
life, as a compromise between these two, is toler- 
ated not as a good, but as having a certain 
honour from the common inability to pursue in- 
justice. For no true man who had the ability to 
effect his will would ever enter into such a con- 
tract with another as would put an end to the 
practising along with the suffering of injustice; 
he would be mad to do so. This by common re- 
port is the nature of justice, and hence its origin. 

And that those who practise justice do so in- 
voluntarily and by reason of impotence, we can 
learn very clearly by resorting to a little fiction. 
We will suppose that both men, the just and the 
unjust, have the liberty to do exactly as they 
please, and then we will follow them in imagina- 
tion and see whither the desire of each leads him. 
So we shall catch the just man, red-handed so to 
speak, taking the same course as the unjust, led 
on by that inborn self-interest which nature in- 
evitably pursues as a good, when it is not diverted 
by law and force into honouring equity. The 


THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 25 


kind of liberty I have in mind for them is like the 
power which the story gives to Gyges, the pro- 
genitor of the Lydian line. They say he was a 
shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia, and 
that once in a great storm and earthquake the 
ground broke open and made a chasm where he 
was pasturing his flock. Amazed at the sight, 
he went down into the opening and beheld many 
marvels which are related in the story—among 
them a hollow horse of bronze, with doors through 
which, by peering in, he saw what appeared to be 
a dead body, but larger than an ordinary man. 
From this body he took nothing but a gold ring 
which was on its hand, and so reascended. 
Afterwards when the shepherds held their 
monthly assembly to send their report to the king 
concerning the flocks, he came with the others, 
having the ring on his finger. And as he sat 
among them, he chanced to twist the collet of the 
ring to the inside of his hand; whereupon he be- 
came invisible to the rest of them, and they began 
to talk about him as if he had gone away. While 
he was wondering at this, he chanced to finger 
the ring again and to turn the collet out, and as 
he did so he reappeared. Observing this result, 
he went on to experiment with the ring to see 
whether it had such a power, and he found that 
when he turned it inwards he grew invisible, when 
outwards visible. With this discovery in mind 





360 


26 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


he took measures to be chosen one of the mes- 
sengers to the court, and when he had come 
thither, seduced the queen, and with her help at- 
tacked and slew the king, and so made himself 
master of the crown. 

Suppose now that there were two such rings, 
and that our just man wore one and our unjust 
man the other. I suspect you would find no man 
so adamantine that he would cling to justice and 
have the nerve to refrain from putting his hand 
on what was not his own, when it was in his power 
to lift whatever he liked from the market with 
impunity, and to enter a house and take his 
pleasure with any one he chose, and to kill and 
release from bonds at his good will, and in general 
to comport himself among men as though he were 
a god. In his actions he would differ in no re- 
spect from the other man, but both would be 
found pursuing the same end. Yet you would 
certainly regard this as evidence that no one is 
just by choice, but under compulsion, as deriving 
no benefit from such a state, since wherever any 
one thinks he has the liberty to be unjust, there he 
is unjust. And in fact all men believe at heart 
that injustice is far more profitable to them per- 
sonally than justice, and believe rightly, as the 
party for whom I am arguing will say. For if 
any one with such liberty as we are supposing 
should refrain resolutely from injustice and never 


THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 27 


lay hand on what was not his own, he would ap- 
pear to lookers-on simply wretched and insen- 
sate, although publicly they might commend him 
and make a pretence of deceiving one another 
for fear of suffering injustice themselves. So 
much for our fiction. 

Next let us turn to a direct judgment of the 
two lives. And we shall be able to make such a 
comparison fairly only by setting the most com- 
pletely just man over against the most complete- 
ly unjust man; and in no other way. And how is 
this contrast to be effected? I answer: from the 
unjust man we will take nothing that pertains to 
injustice, and from the just man nothing per- 
taining to justice, but will posit each as perfectly 
fitted for his own manner of life. In the first 
place, then, our rascal must have the address of 
a clever craftsman. For instance a consummate 
navigator or physician will distinguish between 
the practicable and the impracticable in his art, 
and will limit his undertakings accordingly; and 
if by chance he makes a slip, he still knows how 
to recover himself. In like manner our rascal, if 
he is to be consummate in his kind, must be suc- 
cessful in wrong-doing, and avoid detection, for 
to be found out is to be weak, and the height of 
injustice is to appear just without being so. 
Therefore I say that in the completely unjust 
man we must assume the most complete injustice. 


28 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


There is to be no reservation; but we shall allow 
him, while performing the greatest acts of injus- 
tice to acquire for himself the greatest reputation 
for justice. If he falls into embarrassment, he 
shall be able to extricate himself, by adroitness of 
speech if any of his misdeeds have been informed 
against, by more forcible methods where force is 
required, being a fellow of audacity and energy 
and in command of friends and money. Then by 
the side of such an example let us set up for com- 
parison the just man, in his noble simplicity, who 
desires, as Aeschylus says, not to seem but to be 
good." Here must be no seeming; for if he shall 
seem to be just, honours and rewards will flow to 
him accordingly, and it will not be clear whether 
he is what he is for the sake of justice or for the 
sake of the rewards and honours. Strip him of 
everything save his righteousness, and make him 
in every respect the opposite of the other. Being 
perfectly innocent, let him seem in the eyes of 
mankind the most unjust of all, that his justice 
may be tested by the fire of infamy and its con- 
sequences. Let him not soften, but go on to the 
hour of death, through all his days appearing to 
be unjust but being just. Then indeed, when 
they stand at the summit, one of justice and the 


1This is the famous line of the Seven Against Thebes (592) 
describing Amphiaraus, which, according to Plutarch, drew the 
eyes of all the spectators upon Aristides, 


THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 29 


other of injustice, we can judge between them 
which is the happier. 

The kind of life that awaits each of them is 
only too easy to describe. I am bound to go on 
with the story, and if my language sounds offen- 
sive, you will understand that the words are not 
really mine but belong to those who eulogize in- 
justice as preferable to justice. They will tell 
you that the just man who is reputed unjust 
will be scourged and racked and bound, will 
have his eyes burnt out, and finally after all 
his torments will be impaled,’ and so will learn 
that he ought not to aim at being but at seem- 
ing righteous. The sentiment of Aeschylus ap- 
plies far more fitly to the unjust man; for in 
truth, they will say, it is he who, pursuing the 

2From an early date this passage was applied to the passion 
of Christ. Clement (Strom. V, xiv, 108) quotes the words and 
calls them virtually a prophecy of the Incarnation. The same 
view, to omit other references, is presented in a curious little 
book of the seventeenth century by Merick Casaubon, entitled: 
Of Credulity and Incredulity; in Things Divine and Spiritual: 
Wherein, (among other things) a true and faithful account is 
given of the Platonick Philosophy, as it hath reference to Chris- 
tianity. “As for the Second,’ Casaubon says, “the manner of 
his death, I think there is no antient writer almost but hath it; 
and learned G’rotius, in his observations upon Matthew; his judg- 
ment is, that (non sine Divinae Providentiae instinctu:)it was not 
without an instinct of Divine Providence, that Plato did write so. 
The passage is out of his Second Book de Repub. and goeth com- 
monly, (that passage) under the notion or title De crucifixione 
justi, or, of the crucifying of the just.” 


362 


3654 


30 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


reality of things and not living with a view to ap- 
pearances, desires not to seem un just, but to be— 


“From the deep furrow reaping in his mind 
The harvest of his counsels well-designed.” 


And this is his harvest: first, to be a ruler in 
the city by reason of his reputation for justice, 
and then to marry whence he pleases and give 
in marriage to whom he pleases, do business and 
associate with whom he likes, and always to his 
own profit and advantage because he has no mis- 
givings about the wrong. In any contest he en- 
ters, whether private or public, he will succeed 
and get the better of his rivals, and by this ad- 
vantage will make himself rich and be in a po- 
sition to help his friends and injure his enemies. 
And for the same reason his sacrifices and gifts to 
the gods will be appropriate and magnificent. 
And so serving the gods and the people of his 
choice better than any just man may, he naturally 
will be dear to heaven, dearer than the innocent. 
Thus, Socrates, they say that by the help of gods 
and men a better life is the portion of the unjust 
than of the just.... 


Adeimantus loqutur: ... Now, my dear Socra- 
tes, when a young soul hears all this talk about 
virtue and vice and the way honours are distrib- 
uted by men and gods, what do you suppose he 
will do? I mean the young man who is clever 


THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 31 


by nature and, like a bee on the wing, apt to flit 
about among the sentiments of men, and gather 
from them his own notion of the character and 
procedure that will carry him through life most 
prosperously. I think he is likely to repeat to 
himself the words of Pindar: “‘ ‘Whether by the 
straight path of justice or by the crooked ways of 
deceit ascending the loftier citadel,” shall I forti- 
fy myself for living? Everywhere I hear it said 
that there is no profit for me in being just if I 
also seem unjust, but toil and pain and manifest 
loss, while an enchanting life is presented to me 
if, following injustice, I acquire the reputation of 
justice. Therefore since, as the wise inform me, 
‘seeming masters truth’ and is lord of happiness, 
to seeming I will wholly turn. As a vestibule 
and front I must draw up about myself the pic- 
tured semblance of virtue, but behind them I will 
drag the subtle and shifty fox, as Archilochus, 
that great sage, recommends. ‘But it is not al- 
ways easy, somebody will say, ‘to cover up one’s 
wickedness.’ Nor is any other of the great ven- 
tures a light matter, I should reply; nevertheless, 
if we are to be happy, the tracks of the argument 
point in this direction, and so we must proceed. 
To cover ourselves we will form secret societies 
and clubs; and there are the masters of persuasion 
to teach us the art of addressing assemblies and 
3 Fragment 213, Bergk. 


366 


32 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


courts, by which art, persuading where we can- 
not domineer, we shall contrive to avoid the pen- 
alties of overreaching. ‘Still it is not possible to 
use concealment or force with the gods.’ Very 
good. But if, on the one hand, there are no gods, 
or if they have no care for what mankind is doing, 
why should we trouble ourselves about conceal- 
ment? And if, on the other hand, they do exist 
and have a care for men, yet all we know and 
have heard about them is from law and custom 
and from the genealogical tales of the poets, and 
from these we learn that they can be cajoled and 
diverted by ‘sacrifice and soothing prayers’ and 
offerings. We ought to accept the whole tradi- 
tion or none of it. And if we accept it, then let 
us overreach as we will, and make sacrifice out of 
our profits. By justice we shall simply come off 
unscathed from the gods, while forgoing the 
profit of injustice; by injustice we shall have our 
gain and still, with our prayers and propitiations, 
shall come off unscathed through transgression 
and sin. “But there is yet Hades, where we, and 
perhaps our children, must undergo judgment for 
our sins in this world.’ And also, my friend,” 
our fellow will reply, making his calculation, 
“there are the mysteries and the gods of redemp- 
tion, and these have great power, as the mightiest 
cities declare, and as the poets, who are children 


THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 33 


of the gods, and the prophets of the gods agree in 
proclaiming.” 

What reason then remains that we should pre- 
fer justice to injustice of that great sort, whereby, 
if we combine it with a deceitful regard for ap- 
pearances, we shall fare to our taste among gods 
and men, in this world and the next, as the ma- 
jority of voices, and those not the least weighty, 
assure us? Considering all these arguments, Soc- 
rates, how can you expect to win honour for jus- 
tice from any one endowed with superiority of 
soul or wealth or body or family, or expect aught 
but laughter when he hears it commended? And 
even the rare man, granted his existence, who 
can expose the falsity of these arguments and has 
a clear perception of the supremacy of justice, is 
quite ready to pardon, and forbears to be angry 
with the unjust; for he knows that nobody is just 
by choice, however by reason of timidity or old 
age or some other weakness he censures what he 
is impotent himself to accomplish—nobody at 
least save by virtue of a divine gift of nature 
which inspires him with disgust of wrong, or else 
by the acquisition of knowledge. This is clear. 
For let your pretender once acquire power, and 
he practises injustice to the best of his ability. 

The cause of all this confusion, Socrates, was 
intimated by my brother and me at the beginning 
of the argument, when we declared our astonish- 


367 


34 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ment that of all the professed panegyrists of 
justice, including yourself, from the earliest 
heroes of whom we know anything to the present 
race, not one has ever censured injustice or com- 
mended justice for anything except the reputa- 
tion and honours and benefits that pertain to 
them. But as for the intrinsic operation of each 
in the soul which harbours it, hidden from the 
sight of gods and men, no one has ever yet de- 
scribed this adequately in verse or prose, or shown 
that of all the evils which the soul possesses in 
itself injustice is the worst, whereas justice is the 
greatest good. Had this been the train of rea- 
soning adopted by you moralists from the begin- 
ning and your manner of instructing us from 
childhood, we should not now be guarding one 
another against injustice, but each would be his 
own best guardian, fearful lest by wrong-doing 
he should attach to himself the greatest evil. 
These, and doubtless more of the sort, would 
be the pleas of Thrasymachus or his fellows in 
regard to justice and injustice. It is all a gross 
perversion of the true nature of things, as I am 
bound to think; but, to confess my purpose 
frankly, I have put the matter as strongly as 
possible in the desire of hearing the other side 
from you. I beg you not to stop with asserting 
the mere superiority of justice over injustice, but 
do you demonstrate the immediate effect of each 


THE REPUBLIC, BOOK II 35 


upon its possessor, by which one is essentially an 
evil thing and the other a good thing. And, as 
Glaucon insisted, do not argue on the basis of 
reputation and appearance. Unless you sup- 
press what rightly belongs to each in this respect, 
and grant what is false, we shall retort that you 
are lauding not justice but its appearance, and 
that your censure is not for being but for seem- 
ing unjust; which is tantamount to bidding us 
practise injustice if we can avoid detection. We 
shall say that you really agree with Thrasy- 
machus in regarding justice as another man’s 
good, the interest of the stronger, and injustice 
as one’s own interest and advantage, though in- 
jurious to the weaker. Since then you have ad- 
mitted that justice belongs to that highest class of 
goods, which are desirable to possess for their 
consequences and still more for themselves, like 
seeing, hearing, wisdom, and health, and what- 
ever else is vitally good in its own nature rather 
than in appearance, I will ask you now to direct 
your panegyric to this one point. Show how of 
itself justice brings a blessing to the possessor, 
whereas injustice harms him, and leave to others 
the commendation of rewards and appearances. 
I might be content to hear others praising justice 
and censuring injustice in that way, magnifying 
the appearances and rewards of one and the 
other; but not you, unless you so bid me, since 


36 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


this is a subject you have spent your whole life 
in considering, this and no other. Do not stop 
then with asserting the mere superiority of jus- 
tice over injustice, but demonstrate the immediate 
effect of each upon its possessor, whereby, whether 
hidden or not from gods and men, one is essen- 
tially a good thing and the other an evil thing. 


CHAPTER III 


PHILOSOPHY: JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 


What religion in the most general sense meant 
to Plato he has expressed in a memorable pas- 
sage of the Theaetetus: 


“But it is not possible that evils should cease 
to be—since by reason of necessity there must al- 
ways be something contrary to the good—neither 
can they have their seat among the gods, but of 
necessity they haunt mortal nature and this re- 
gion of ours. Wherefore our aim should be to 
escape hence to that other world with all speed. 
And the way of escape is by becoming like to God 
in so far as we may. And the becoming like is in 
becoming just and holy by taking thought... . 
God is never in any wise unjust, but most per- 
fectly just, and there is nothing more like to him 
than one of us who should make himself just to 
the limit of man’s power.” 

That is an idea on which Plato was fond of 
dwelling, and which never after was to leave the 
Greek consciousness. Its echo will be found 
everywhere in the pagan Platonists of a later age. 
It is the substance of the Plotinian ethics; and in 
Maximus of Tyre, to mention only one of the 


176A 


38 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


lesser lights, it lends point and gravity to a finely 
conceived little sermon on friendship." For the 
Christian the idea easily connected itself with the 
statement of Genesis that man was made in the 
likeness of God, and with the command of Jesus 
to do good to them that hate us that we may be- 
come like to our Father in heaven; and in this 
form, sometimes dressed in the exact phraseolo- 
gy of Plato, it permeates the whole course of 
Christian literature.’ 

Now it is sufficiently clear that this conception 
of homoidsis (becoming like to God), as the cen- 
tral fact to Plato of the religious life, involves 
both theology and mythology, involves, that is to 
say, both the knowing of what God is and the 
bringing together of God and man. But at this 
point the more important matter to consider is 
the part taken in it by philosophy. If we should 
say that the answer to this question depends on 


1 Philosophoumena xxxv, 2p: “How then should men become 
like to God? By imitating that in him which is preservative 
and friendly and paternal. This is a mortal likeness to divine 
virtue, which among the gods is called right and justice and by 
other mystical and godlike names, and among men is called friend- 
ship and graciousness and by other kindly and human names.” 

2It appears in the first of the Apostolic Fathers (I Clement 
xxxiii); it is a constant thought of Chrysostom (e.g. In Mat. 
238, 239a). Perhaps the most notable passage is that in which 
Clement of Alexandria (Stromata II, xix, xx), taking the words 
of the Theaetetus as his text, so expounds them as to merge Pla- 
tonism and Christianity in one beautiful blend. 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 39 


whether we hold the becoming just to precede 
logically the becoming like to God or the con- 
trary, we might seem to be indulging in a verbal 
quibble; yet in truth it is on precisely such a dis- 
tinction that the difference between the religious 
procedure of Platonism and Christianity turns. 
We become like the gods by becoming just, Plato 
says; and in the same way we become dear to the 
gods, since like, as the proverb runs, is always 
dear to like. Very good; but what is the relation 
between justice and the divine nature? Is justice 
that which God wills, or does God will that which 
is Just? Is justice dear to Him because it is His 
will, or does He will justice because it is dear to 
Him? Is the conception of justice and holiness 
prior in our minds to our conception of God, or 
is our conception of God prior to the conception 
of justice and holiness? That is a question first 
raised by Plato, and from that day to this it has 
not ceased to trouble the current of theological 
thinking; its answer, determining whether phi- 
losophy or theology and mythology shall guide 
and dominate religion, is fraught with momentous 
consequences. 

Suppose a Christian and a Platonist con- 
fronted by the dilemma presented in the sceptical 
philosophy of Sextus Empiricus: 


“Again, if the divine exists, either it has virtue 
or it has not. If it has not, then the divine is a 


Lysis 2148 


40 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


poor and wretched thing,—an absurd conclusion. 
If it has, then there will be something greater, or 
higher, than God; for as the virtue of a horse is 
greater, or higher, than the horse itself, and as the 
virtue of man is greater, or higher, than the pos- 
sessor, in the same way the virtue of God will be 
greater, or higher, than God himself. But if it is 
greater, or higher, than God, evidently God, as 
deficient in nature, will be a poor thing and sub- 
ject to corruption. But if there is no middle term 
between these opposites, and God cannot be seen 
to fall under either of them, then we must say 
that God is not.” 

From the horns of this dilemma the Christian 
would escape by denying that either “has” or “has 
not” is applicable to the relation of God to virtue; 
virtue will be whatever God is, He does not pos- 
sess but is the source of virtue. The logical posi- 
tion of Christianity, however individual theolog- 
ians may have wavered in their judgment, is to 
make justice and holiness depend on the fiat of 
God; a thing is right because God so commands.* 

3 Adv. Physicos i, 176. 

4As a matter of fact Christian theologians have not been con- 
sistent on this point. So, for instance, Jonathan Edwards, as an 
extreme Calvinist, leads the good and evil of the world logically 
up to God’s arbitrary decree that such should be, yet he bases 
the righteousness of that decree on God’s choice of “the moral 
good which He sees” (upon a principle, that is, outside of and 
superior to God’s being), and on an aboriginal distinction “be- 
tween different objects that are proposed to the Divine Under- 
standing.” (See Shelburne Essays XI, 59.) 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 41 


Plato, on the contrary, virtually throws himself 
upon the second horn of the dilemma, though he 
would repudiate vehemently the inference that 
because God is in any way deficient He should 
therefore be held a poor thing or subject to cor- 
ruption. At least in the T%imaeus, as we shall see 
when we come to consider Plato’s mythology, he 
sets the ultimate source of good and evil outside 
of the divine nature, evil being below God, and 
good in a way, as that which He imitates in the 
act of creation, above God. 

This question touching the primacy of the 
moral law or of the divine will is raised only in- 
directly in the Timaeus. In the Euthyphro it is 
put categorically as a matter fundamental to 
ethics and religion, but is left without clear an- 
swer. The solution, Plato implies, can be reached 
only when we have learned what justice in itself 
is, and to the solving of this problem he devotes 
the long dialogue of T'he Republic, to which the 
Euthyphro, together with the Gorgias, serves as a 
kind of preface. The problem is stated with the 
utmost precision and emphasis in the introduc- 
tory paragraphs of the second book of The Re- 
public, a translation of which is given in the pre- 
ceding chapter. In the tenth book of the Laws, 
where Plato unfolds his great theological argu- 
ment, the controversy will be directed against 
those who deny the existence of the gods, or, ad- 


10a ff. 


885B 


365D 


42 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


mitting their existence, reject their providential 
government of man, or believe they can be recon- 
ciled to man’s evil-doing by bribery. ‘These three 
theses he will lay down explicitly as the basis of 
theology: the being of the gods, the Providence 
of the gods, and their inexorable justice. Now, 
in the exordium to the argument of The Republic, 
he isolates the problem of philosophy by a hypo- 
thetical denial of just these three theses.’ “There- 
fore,’ so the supposition runs, “if on the one 
hand there are no gods, or if they have no care for 
what mankind is doing, why should we trouble 
ourselves about concealment? And if, on the 
other hand, they do exist and have a care for men, 
yet all we know and have heard about them is 
from law and custom and from the genealogical 
tales of the poets, and from these we learn that 
they can be cajoled and diverted by ‘sacrifice and 
soothing prayers’ and offerings.” ‘Thus the task 
set before Socrates is to discover the nature of 
justice (righteousness, that is, or essential moral- 
ity) in itself, and to determine whether it is better 
to pursue justice for its own sake apart from all 

5 I cannot understand the frame of mind of Rohde (see Psyche 
II, 265 note) and other scholars who take these passages as evi- 
dence that at one time Plato did not believe in the immortality 
of the soul, and first introduced the belief paradoxically in the 
tenth book. It should seem that the hypothetical nature of the 


denial was sufficiently emphasized to forestall any such interpre- 
tation. 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 43 


external rewards in this world and the next. ‘To 
this end Socrates and his friends compare the 
perfectly just man with the perfectly unjust 
man; and in order that all disturbing complica- 
tions may be eliminated they imagine the just 
man subjected to the many physical ills of life 
and burdened with the reputation of injustice, 
whereas the unjust man shall enjoy every sort of 
physical comfort and all the honours awarded to 
the appearance of probity and magnanimity. 
They go further, and suppose, for the sake of 
the argument, that there are no gods at all or 
no Providence, or that, like men, the gods, if they 
exist, can be cheaply hoodwinked. It is not easy 
to see how the central problem of philosophy 
could be severed more absolutely from every theo- 
logical and mythological disturbance, or how the 
law of righteousness could be set up more unmis- 
takably as a consideration prior to the being and 
nature of God. One thing is manifest, that for 
Plato in philosophy, thus regarded, religion has 
its true beginning and finds its desired assurance. 
Here, in the knowledge of a truth which has its 
own immediate sanction, rests in the last resort 
our hope of spiritual peace; whatever follows, 
and much of deep importance is to follow, is but 
complementary, receding further and further into 
the shadows of uncertainty and conjecture as we 
proceed outwards from this central illumination. 


44 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


What then is this justice, or righteousness, so 
desirable in itself? The arguments on which 
Plato bases his answer to this question, the very 
heart indeed of what is meant by Platonism, I 
have attempted to expound in the volume intro- 
ductory to the present series, and shall not re- 
peat here. But as to the quality of justice, if it 
can be defined by any single term, it is by the 
word measure,—the outcome of that last, undis- 
covered force within a man, which acts as a check 
and stay upon the restless, imperious, tumultuous 
impulses and desires and emotions ever swelling 
out of the dark background of life, a force which, 
itself unseen, brings order out of disorder, pro- 
portion out of excess, balance out of discord, peace 
out of agony, out of the unmeasured measure. 
Plato’s doctrine of justice is in fact a compen- 
dium of the results of what Greek thought had 
come to be in the pre-Socratic age; and from 
Plato it was passed on to Aristotle, who builds 
on it a systematic scheme of ethics as determined 
by the law of the golden mean, and a system of 
metaphysics as determined by the law of form. 

If justice is this inner law of measure, balance, 
health, how shall its attainment be known; what 
is the mark by which its possession is made mani- 
fest? Here again we perceive the diverging ways 
of religion as it starts from mythology or from 
philosophy. For the religious man whose faith 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 45 


is founded primarily on mythology there is no 
certainty in the life of righteousness save in the 
judgment to come— 

“As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 

Of so much fame in heaven expect thy meed.” 


Without this expected reversal of the conditions 
of the actual world there is no moral law; right 
and wrong, justice and injustice, are but empty 
names; we live under clouds of confusion and 
ignorance beyond which rides no sun. For the 
Christian our existence must ever be a state of 
hope nourished by belief in the particular myth 
of Christ’s redeeming act of sacrifice, and if we 
are deceived in this belief, then are we, as St. 
Paul says, “of all men most miserable.”* New- 
man is not afraid to put the condition even more 
emphatically : 

“Our duty as Christians lies in this, in making 
ventures for eternal life without absolute cer- 
tainty of success. ... If then faith be the essence 
of a Christian life, and if it be what I have now 
described, it follows that our duty lies in risking 
upon Christ’s word what we have, for what we 
have not; and doing so in a noble, generous way, 
not indeed rashly or lightly, still without knowing 
accurately what we are doing, not knowing 
either what we give up, nor again what we shall 
gain; uncertain about our reward, uncertain 


61 Corinthians xv, 19. 


46 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


about our extent of sacrifice, in all respects lean- 
ing, waiting upon Him, trusting in Him to ful- 
fil His promise, trusting in Him to enable us to 
fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects pro- 
ceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the 
future.” 

I am not holding a brief against Christianity, 
nor, as I have said before, have I any intention of 
prejudicing the case by the use of the word 
“myth.” My purpose here is simply to draw out 
the difference between the two approaches to the 
religious life. For it was exactly the hypothesis 
of Plato that this judgment to come should be 
eliminated, and that by an exaggeration of the 
apparent confusions of this life the difficulty of 
determining right and wrong should be faced 
without flinching. His method has at least the 
merit of boldness. Let the man assumed to be 
just suffer all the ills that should seem to belong 
to injustice, let the man assumed to be unjust 
enjoy the advantages that should seem to belong 
to justice, yet one sign nevertheless the man him- 
self has, one infallible criterion, to know his own 
state, viz. the inner sense, now and immediate, of 
happiness or misery. And this inner sense, Plato 
declares, is so much more significant than all ex- 
ternal conditions that the pursuit of justice is 
preferable at any cost; so far do the awards of 


7 Parochial and Plain Sermons IV, xx. Compare Pascal’s pari. 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 47 


conscience outweigh whatever the emotions and 
physical senses can give, that any man who has 
learned to distinguish his own feelings need have 
no hesitaney in determining the general path of 
righteousness and in preferring that path to every 
other. Clement of Alexandria summed up the 
essence of Platonism in a memorable sentence: 
“Plato himself says that happiness (ewdaimonia) 
is the well-being of the daemon, and that by the 
daemon is meant the governing element of the 
soul, and that the most perfect and fullest good is 
this happiness.”* And the same definition of 
Plato’s swmmum bonum was given by the great 
sceptic, who then seeks to undermine its basis as 
follows: 


“This is as much as to say that, in order to com- 
prehend human happiness (eudaimonia), we 
must first have a conception of God and daemon, 
and in order to comprehend God, we must first 
have a conception of the happy man (eudaimonos 
anthropou). 'Therefore the conception of each 
depends upon the conception of the other, and 
both are inconceivable.” 


The argument is cleverly turned; but, however 
it might apply to Christian theology, it has no 
bearing upon Plato’s philosophy. The daemon 
involved in the Platonic conception of happiness 


8 Stromata II, xxii, 131. 
9 Sextus Empiricus, ddv. Physicos i, 47. 


48 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


is not to be taken as a power outside of our imme- 
diate experience, but as emphatically a power of 
the soul, as the very soul. The knowledge of the 
daemon and the knowledge of happiness are one 
and the same act of self-knowledge.” 

Philosophy then may be defined to be the soul’s 
discovery of itself, as an entity having a law and 
interests of its own apart from and above all this 
mixed and incomprehensible life of the body. 
That I take it—the soul’s deep content in the 
recognition of itself—is the beginning of the Pla- 
tonic religion and, if not the beginning, certainly 
the consummation of Christianity. I would say 
it was the essential matter of all religion, were it 
not for the strange phenomenon of a great orien- 
tal faith which has succeeded in preaching the 
doctrine of salvation and happiness without it. 
In one of the most interesting historically of the 
Buddhist books we have the report of a conversa- 
tion between Menander (Milinda, in the Pali), 
a Greek king of the Punjab in the second century 
B. c., and the saint Nagasena on this very topic, 


10 Sallust, a friend of the Emperor Julian, was recalling this 
thesis of philosophy, though his words were not quite such as 
Plato would have chosen, when he said: “The souls of the good 
return purified back to the gods; and even were this not so, yet 
would virtue itself and the pleasure and glory of virtue, the life 
without pain or master, suffice for the happiness of the virtuous” 
(De Diis et Mundo 21, as abridged by Zeller, Die Philosophie der 
Griechen V, 667). 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 49 


with the result that the Greek, not well fortified, 
it must be admitted, in dialectic, is driven to 
assent to a purely nominalistic argument against 
the existence of the soul as an individual entity. 
And the same conclusion is drawn in various 
passages of other books, as, for instance, in these 
words of the Visuddhi-Magga: 


“Just as the word ‘chariot’ is but a mode of 
expression for axle, wheels, chariot-body, pole, 
and other constituent members, placed in a cer- 
tain relation to each other, but when we come to 
examine the members one by one, we discover 
that in the absolute sense there is no chariot; and 
just as the word ‘house’ is but a mode of expres- 
sion for wood and other constituents of a house, 
surrounding space in a certain relation, but in the 
absolute sense there is no house;.. . in exactly the 
same way the words ‘living entity’ and ‘Ego’ are 
but a mode of expression for the presence of the 
five attachment groups, but when we come to 
examine the elements of being one by one, we 
discover that in the absolute sense there is no liv- 
ing entity there to form a basis for such figments 
as ‘I am,’ or ‘I’; in other words, that in the abso- 
lute sense there is only name and form. The in- 
sight of him who perceives this is called know- 
ledge of the truth.’ 


11H, C. Warren, Buddhism in Translations 133. See also E. W. 
Hopkins, The Religions of India 335.—A like nominalistic dissec- 
tion of the soul is placed by Plato in the mouth of Diotima 


50 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


To Buddha, with his settled abhorrence of any- 
thing savouring of metaphysical entities, the 
question of the soul, when he is pressed for an 
answer, is simply brushed aside as one not tend- 
ing to edification; only this he will pronounce as 
a certainty, that the effects of a man’s deeds are 
unescapable in this life and endure after him as 
the condition of a new life, so that it behooves us 
to strive earnestly for righteousness.” In other 
words Buddha taught the doctrine of Karma, 
the inevitable law of cause and effect in the moral 
order, rather than metempsychosis as we under- 
stand it. Yet withal the fact that a man may 
recover the memory of past lives shows that even 
for him these successive existences are in some 
way strung together on a thread of consciousness, 
however useless and disturbing it may be to dis- 
cuss the nature of this binding thread. 

Whatever weight we may give to this oriental 
view, certainly to Socrates the mission of the 
philosopher was to preach just this doctrine of 
the soul as a living entity with its own rights and 
its own law. When he stood before the court of 


(Symposium 207p ff). But Plato leaves the desire of immor- 

tality by succession of father and son and by propagation of 

virtue in others as a spur to noble actions. And in the end 

this immortality by succession is shown to be only an image of 

the true immortality, which belongs to the individual by reason 

of his contemplation of the eternal Ideas. After all the soul is. 
12 Majjhima-Nikdya Sutta 63. 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 51 


Athens to defend himself as the true Athenian, 
he spoke the message once for all for our western 
world: 


“While there is breath to me and I am able [ Arley 2% 
will not cease from the life of philosophy, neither 
will I desist from admonishing you. And whom- 
soever of you I meet, with him will I argue as 
my wont is and say to him: My good friend, 
you who belong to Athens, this city great and 
glorious for wisdom and, power, are you not 
ashamed that your life is given up to the winning 
of much money and reputation and rank, while 
for wisdom and truth and the good of your own 
soul you care not and have no concern? And if 
he disputes and asserts his care for these things, 
I will not quickly let him go or leave him, but 
will question and examine him and put him to 
the proof; and if then he seems to claim a virtue 
which he does not possess, I will rebuke him be- 
cause the things of most value he little esteems, 
but prizes those of meaner worth. . . . For this, 
I assure you, is the command of the god; and I 
think no greater blessing has ever befallen you 
in the city than this my service to the god. For 
I do nothing else but go about persuading you, 
young and old, not to take thought first for your 
bodies and for money, but more diligently to con- 
sider the good of your own souls.” 


Such at least are the words put into the mouth 
of Socrates by one who was present at the trial, 


52 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


and there can be little doubt that they indicate 
faithfully the source of his power. In a letter to 
Themistius the Emperor Julian, who almost at 
the close of our period sought to revive the old 
pagan faith, not understanding that Christianity 
was the most legitimate heir of what was best in it, 
wrote: 


“The achievements of Alexander the Great are 
outdone in my eyes by Socrates son of Sophronis- 
cus. It is to him I ascribe the wisdom of Plato, 
the fortitude of Antisthenes, the generalship of 
Xenophon, the Eretriac and Megaric philoso- 
phies, with Cebes, Simmias, Phaedo, and count- 
less others. To him too we owe the colonies that 
they planted, the Lyceum, the Stoa, and the 
Academies. Who ever found salvation in the 
victories of Alexander? ... Whereas it is thanks 
to Socrates that all who find salvation in philoso- 
phy are being saved even now.” 


It was because Plato alone of all Socrates’ dis- 
ciples felt the full weight of his spiritual affir- 
mation, and saw that it was not contradicted by 
the Socratic scepticism or endangered by the So- 
cratic rationalism, but received confirmation from 
them—for this reason Plato became the true 
spokesman of the Greek Tradition, whereas the 
other disciples of Socrates are known to us rather 


13 Quoted by Professor Burnet in The Socratic Doctrine of the 
Soul, 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 53 


as the heads of schools, the schismatics and he- 
resiarchs of philosophy so to speak. 

Philosophy then, as Plato understood it, leads 
first of all to an obvious distinction between soul 
and body. Yet this is not the whole story; indeed 
it is fair to say that much of the pseudo-Platon- 
ism of a later age, especially as it took the form 
of a crass asceticism, may be traced to a failure 
to carry Plato’s dualism to its genuine source. 
For with Plato the deeper meaning of the search 
for righteousness lay not in a mechanical division 
between soul and body, but in a sense of division 
within the soul itself. We shall have occasion 
to study the relation of this psychic dualism to 
the connexion of soul and body more fully when 
we come to our exposition of the mythology of 
the Timaeus; it will be sufficient here to point to 
the notable passage of the tenth book of The Re- 
public in which Socrates contends that the real 
evil of the soul is nothing external to its nature, 
not a property of the body, but a quality of the 
soul itself, working within the soul its own per- 
version and misery. This is the thought carried 
out in that eloquent diatribe on the honour and 
dishonour of the soul, which introduces the fifth 
book of the Laws: “To every man his all is dual. 
To the stronger and better things pertains mas- 
tery, to the lesser and baser servitude; wherefore 


608p ff. 


726 


54 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


always a man should honour the master parts of 
himself above the servile.” 

The dualism of the soul itself could not be ex- 
pressed more categorically than in these pas- 
sages; nevertheless it is in immediate sequence 
to the clear statement of The Republic just 
quoted that Plato introduces the well-known 
simile of Glaucus, the sea-god. As the body of 
Glaucus was scarcely recognizable by reason of 
the overgrowth of shells and weeds clinging about 
it, and by reason of the mangling and distortion 
it had suffered from the waves, so we see the soul 
befouled by its association with the body and mis- 
shapen by the other evils that hang upon it. Yet 
not thus ought we to regard it, but should look 
thither, to its philosophy, and consider its higher 
contacts and what purer intercourse it desires, as 
being in its essence related to the divine and eter- 
nal, and should contemplate it as it may be when 
drawn by its innate aspiration out of this sea in 
which it is now immersed, and when beaten free, 
so to speak, of these earthy and savage accoutre- 
ments that grow upon it amidst its so-called 
blessed revellings. Then indeed we should know 
the soul as it truly is, not as we seem to know it 
through the passions of this human life. 

There is, let us acknowledge, an inconsistency, 
unless we choose to call it a mere imperfection of 
terminology, to be reckoned with here. At one 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 55 


time, as in the famous image of the chariot, Plato 
speaks of the soul as “composite,” having within 
itself a faculty which reaches upwards to the di- 
vine, and a power also which pulls it downwards 
to the baser contaminations of the flesh; at an- 
other time he defines it as “incomposite” and akin 
by its very simplicity to what is unchanging and 
incorruptible. The fact is that Plato is here 
brought up against the insoluble paradox of the 
dualism of human nature, the same paradox 
which in Christianity was to be stated mytho- 
logically in the dogma of the one person and two 
natures of Christ.** Sometimes our real person- 
ality seems to reside in that portion of our being 
which is divine and uncontaminated by the world, 
in the soul, that is to say, considered apart from 

14 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Platon II, 220: “Eine Entscheidung 
gibt Platon nicht, sagt vielmehr ausdriicklich [Republic] 612a 
cite ToAveLdys ete povoerdys-” The same uncertainty will be found 
in St. Paul, who at one time contrasts mvetpa, “spirit,” and odpé, 
“flesh,” and at another time alters this opposition to one of 
“spirit” and yvyx7, “soul.” He differs from Plato normally in 
regarding the “spirit” as a power introduced into man from above 
rather than as an integral part of man; yet again he becomes 
Platonic when he writes of the man’s self, his ego, torn between 
these two contending powers, as neither “spirit” alone nor “soul” 
(or “flesh”) alone, but somehow as both of these at once. At the 
end of our period the same ambiguity will be found in Chrysos- 
tom. I cannot see that the modern study of psychology has 
brought us one whit nearer to the elucidation of this mystery. 
We are one, and we are two; and this is all that dualism ven- 
tures to pronounce, 


Phaedrus 
246A 


‘Phaedo 78c 


56 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


the body and the contacts with phenomena, while 
at other times we are more conscious of a division 
of our being which opens down into the depths 
of personality. But withal the “philosophy of 
the soul” is to strive to behold it in its purer es- 
sence, stripped and cleansed of its muddy vest- 
ments, however these may be conceived. That 
is Justice, when by a complete self-knowledge a 
man has become master of himself (or “better 
than himself,” kreittén hautou, as the phrase runs 
with a significant and beautiful ambiguity) ; that 
is happiness, ewdaimonia, when there is no longer 
a hostile division of the powers within the soul, 
like to faction within a city, but a measured har- 
mony and the unity of subordination. 

The next step in Plato’s religion, the question 
of the soul’s immortality, carries us to the border- 
land between philosophy and theology; for in the 
Greek Tradition, from the beginning to the end, 
life beyond the grave was closely associated with 
the being and nature of deity. In Homeric times 
the chief distinction between gods and men was 
that the former lived forever in a light where the 
shadow of death did not fall, whereas the human 
soul, after its brief appearance on earth, passed 
to a region of gloom, where, if it could be said 
to exist at all, it was as an insubstantial wraith, 
like the images that flit through our minds in the 
dreams of sleep. And in later ‘days, among 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 57 


pagan and Christian alike, to say that the soul 
survived in the full enjoyment of its powers was 
equivalent to calling it divine; to be endowed 
with immortality and to be deified were almost 
synonymous terms.*” It is therefore quite in the 
order of Greek thought that one of Plato’s most 
elaborate arguments for the duration of the soul 
as the ultimate source of motion should have been 
directed to prove the being of God.** In discuss- 
ing the question of immortality we are still in the 
province of philosophy in so far as the appeal is 
to the soul’s knowledge of itself. But the evi- 
dence is of another sort; like the evidence for the 
existence of the gods, it is less immediate and 
positive, more dependent on the colder conclu- 
sions of reason, than in the case of the great 
ethical thesis of The Republic. 

There are three main demonstrations of im- 
mortality in the Dialogues. One of these is the 
aforesaid argument of the Laws for the soul and 
for God as self-moving entities and so logically 
and temporally antecedent to the chain of me- 
chanical motion. Here the future existence of 
the soul, its immortality in the common meaning 


15So Lucian, quoting Heraclitus, says (Vitarum Auctio 14): 
Ti dat of dvOpwror; @eot Ovnrot. Ti dat of Geot; "AvOpwroe 
aQavaro.. And Clement, in his sermon Quis Dives Salvetur 19, 
speaks of spiritual wealth as @eozoudv kai was xopnydy aiwviov. 

16 See post in the translation of Laws x. 


245c ff. 


58 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


of the word, is left to be implied from its prenatal 
eternity, but in the Phaedrus the same argument 
from the soul’s faculty of self-motion is extended 
explicitly in both directions. All that we call 
soul, it is there said, is immortal, since it contains 
within itself the principle of continuity. That 
which moves another and is itself moved by an- 
other will have rest from life as it has rest from 
motion; but that which is self-moved, as it has 
no reason to abandon itself, ceases not to move, 
and is the source and principle of motion for all 
other things that move. Such a source and prin- 
ciple is without beginning, itself the begmning of 
all things that come to be. For if it began, that 
from which it began would be the source and 
principle. And as it is without beginning, so it 
must be without end; since if the source failed, 
there would be nothing from which it or anything 
else should come into being, and all would be 
nothing. Neither therefore can it perish nor 
come into being, or all the world would come to 
a standstill and fall together, having no source 
of motion or existence. All material bodies that 
have their motion from without are lifeless, that is 
to say soulless; all that have their motion from 
within and from themselves are possessed of a 
living soul. So it is we say that soul, and soul 
alone, is without beginning or end, without birth 
or death. 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 59 


This may be called the first demonstration; the 
second, given in the tenth book of The Republic, 
is closely akin to it. Everything in nature per- 
ishes by its own evil, not by the evil that pertains 
to something else. Thus, if a man’s body per- 
ishes, it does so by reason of its own disease. The 
disease may have been brought on by corrupt 
food, but the corruption of the food is nothing 
to us unless there is some weakness in the body 
itself which lays it open to infection. The vice 
or evil inherent in each thing, and that alone, is 
the true cause of its destruction; and if anything 
can be found which shows corruption yet is not 
dissolved or destroyed by that corruption, such a 
nature will be exempt from dissolution and death. 
But just this is found to be true of the soul. Its 
evil, like its good, is its own, a moral attribute 
rooted in its self-motion, and distinct from evil in 
any other form. And moral evil has this pecul- 
iarity, that it does not, as does the body’s evil to 
the body, waste or destroy that in which it occurs. 
So far from consuming the soul, injustice and the 
other vices seem often to increase its activity, 
just as the nature of all desire is to expand in- 
definitely. Hence we argue that the soul, as it 
does not perish by its own evil, is not mortal, like 
all things material, but lives forever. 

The third demonstration is that which occu- 
pied the minds of the little Socratic band during 


608p ff. 


60 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


the last memorable day in gaol, as recorded in the 
Phaedo. The arguments put into the mouth of 
Socrates, and probably reproducing in the main 
his actual conversation (though Plato admits that 
he himself, owing to illness, was not present), are 
too long to be considered here in detail. Briefly, 
however, we may observe that they follow three 
lines, which may be designated as the physical, 
the Ideal, and the metaphysical. 

The first of these applies to the soul the theory 
which in physical science is known as the conser- 
vation of energy. It proceeds much as does the 
argument from motion in the Phaedrus. As 
there is change in material phenomena, one thing 
passing into another or one state into another, 
but with no loss or accretion to the sum of exist- 
ing energy; so in psychical phenomena life 
springs from death and death from life with end- 
less alternation. If this were not so, and that 
which died did not return to life, or that which 
was born did not suffer death, then the sum of 
life would soon be exhausted or would be ex- 
tended beyond measure, instead of remaining a 
fixed quantity. Hence life and death are only 
alternations in the continuity of soul. As for the 
third, the metaphysical argument, it is of the 
same nature and has about the same exasperat- 
ing elusiveness as the ontological proof of the 
existence of God. If you define God as being, 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 61 


then God must be; so, if you define soul as life, 
then it must live, and as soul cannot perish. 
There is in fact not much satisfaction in either 
the physical or the metaphysical form of demon- 
stration. So far as they have any validity, they 
merely prove the continued existence in the world 
of something which we may agree to call soul, 
while of the nature of that entity, or of your im- 
mortality or of mine in any sense of the word 
worthy of discussion, they say nothing. 

But the argument from Ideas, which forms 
the heart and centre of the whole dialogue, is not 
to be thus lightly dismissed. This has a validity 
of another sort, a source of conviction which lies 
deeper than the logic of words, and which has set 
the Phaedo by the side of the Bible as one of the 
indispensable and inexhaustible documents of our 
religion. 

Talking with his friends under the shadow of 
death which will descend upon him with the set- 
ting of the sun, talking while the sunlight is still 
upon the hills, Socrates asks if they are not aware 
of two lives that divide their interest: one the life 
involved in the urgent needs of the body, a net- 
work of desires which can never be really satis- 
fied, reaching after pleasures inextricably bound 
up with pain and leaving the heart uneasy 
whether fulfilled or unfulfilled, brief and ephem- 


62 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


eral at best,’’ at the worst terrible and devastat- 
ing; the other life turned to the thought of eternal 
values, under whose impulsion we cease to de- 
mand the satisfaction of beauty from things 
which are forever clouded with uncertainty and 
may even conceal temptations to embrace ugli- 
ness, or to demand the satisfaction of righteous- 
ness from deeds which can never be Judged apart 
from the perplexity of consequences, and set our 
heart on those spiritual laws—or powers, let us 
say—which are the source of attraction in what- 
ever appears beautiful and the impelling motive 
in whatever is done for righteousness’ sake, and 
which we think we might see in themselves as 
radiant entities, somewhere and somehow, with 
other eyes than those of the body, if only we 
could escape from the limitations and hindrances 
of mortality. This is the great bargain of phi- 
losophy, the exchange of the desire towards what 
is ephemeral and subject to mutation for the 
hope, to be perfectly fulfilled in some other exist- 
ence, of what is deathless and immutable. The 
hope is within the choice of any man, and if the 
hope is earnest it soon, by a process which can be 
verified in experience, passes into a certainty of 
belief. 


17 This becomes the traditional ground of rejecting pleasure 
as a “good.” So Maximus Tyrius xxxi, 1s: Oirws kai Tod ayabov 
y 3 , X 3 / \ Q , nw > aA A 
et Tis deXot THY akpiBeay Kal THY OTdcW, TvvadelrAEv aiTOV Kal 
Thy pvow. 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 63 


Hence philosophy is a kind of study of death, 
not in a morbid or rebellious sense, though to 
Socrates, now waiting for the fateful summons, 
some unusual emphasis of asceticism may be al- 
lowed, but as a preparation for the departure 
some day in peace and good cheer. Rather, we 
might say that philosophy is not so much a study 
of death as of deathlessness, and a search for the 
signs of eternity in the objects of time. And 
what then if it should happen to any man in that 
search to get glimpses of beauty itself or of right- 
eousness itself, pure, untainted, unmixed, not as 
we know them by symbols and tokens in the flesh 
and in the petty paraphernalia of mortality, but 
in the singleness of their divine nature? Should 
you call it a mean condition to keep the eye of the 
soul raised to that vision and to live in communion 
with it? If you reflect, you will say that such a 
man will bring forth no illusory images of virtue 
but the realities of righteousness, as is meet for 
one who has wedded himself to the very truth; 
and his immortality will not be that of those who 
seek to prolong a kind of vicarious existence in 
the generations of their children, nor the mere 
hope of some future state of blessedness, but the 
present possession of one who has grown like and 
dear to God.* ‘The hope and the present assur- 


18 The argument is reproduced for Christians by Origen in his 
Evhortatio ad Martyrium 47: "Ert 8& xai drole? avOpwros, mei- 


64 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ance are possible, Socrates would argue, because 
there is that within us which is akin to the eternal 
world of Ideas as there is that within us which 
binds us to the phenomenal or material world.” 

Such is the central argument of the Phaedo, 
continued and confirmed in the Symposium. Un- 
happily, in this inadequate summary, it is de- 
spoiled of its magnificent art of persuasion; but 
even in its fulness, and presented with all Plato’s 
imaginative eloquence, one must admit that it 
still lacks the finality of logical demonstration. 
One can hear the doubter retort that by the same 
procedure any proposition, whether true or false, 
can be established. It is a fact, he will say, that, 
if you deliberately fix your mind on those so- 
called Ideas, they will become more and more 
real to you until you have an unalterable convic- 
tion of their existence as independent and eternal 
entities, and an equally unalterable conviction of 
something within yourself akin to the immortal 
nature attributed to them. But this is merely to 
cpa AaBwv rept ovcias AoyiKHAs Wux7s, os Exovons TL Tvyyeves Dea, 
voepa yap €xdtepa Kal ddpata, Kat ds 6 émikpat@v dmodeixvvor 
Abyos, dowpata. Ti 8 Kat 6 KaracKevdlwv Huas éverroler roBov THs 
mpos avtov evoeBelas Kal Kowwvias, doTts Kal év Tols Eopadpevors 
ixvn twa cole Tod Belov Bovdrrjparos, eitep wy Fv Svvarov TO 
pvoixas oOovpevov Tots AoyiKois KatadaPelv; Kai cadés, Ste 
Gorep Exactov péeAos Huov mpds TL réepuKev oikedTHTA THLELY, Ot 
6h0arpol pos Ta Spata kal Ora mpods Ta akovoTd, OVTW vos TpOS 
Ta vonTa Kal Tov éréxewva TOV vonTav Oedv. 


19 For a full discussion of Ideas see Platonism, chapter vi. 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 65 


grant that the mind works in a certain way; it 
manifestly does not prove that the belief so con- 
firmed is true. You have only to dwell on any 
other proposition, and it will gradually permeate 
your thoughts until it will seem to you that no 
other mode of thinking is possible. 

So much the Platonist as a dialectician will con- 
cede, is indeed obliged to concede; but he will 
maintain that, although conviction is not proof, 
the consequences following upon conviction may 
afford a kind of demonstration which a wise man 
will not disregard. Set your thoughts to move 
forward on one path, and you may arrive at con- 
viction indeed, but with that conviction will come 
confusion of mind and distraction of motives and 
loss of that assured peace which is the end of all 
striving and seeking; and this will happen be- 
cause your thoughts are not in harmony with the 
realities which are not yours to create and over 
which you have no control. Whereas by moving 
forward on the contrary path you will grow in 
inner strength and happiness, for the reason that 
you are adapting your belief to spiritual realities. 
Thus it is with Ideas and immortality; the 
demonstration of their truth lies in the conse- 
quence of believing. So far as life is concerned 
the test of such matters is a pragmatic inference 
from experience.” 

20 See Appendix B. 


29a 
40c 


41c 


66 — THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


In other words, the argument for immortality 
belongs to philosophy, but les on the verge of 
that further province of religion which is con- 
cerned with the existence and nature of God. 
Socrates, in the A pology, was speaking strictly as 
a philosopher when he avowed that no man knows 
certainly whether death is the end of all or a mi- 
gration from life to life, and when, with this con- 
cession to scepticism, he uttered his unfaltering 
affirmation that we “ought to be of good hope 
towards death, being persuaded of this one truth 
at least, that no evil can befall a good man either 
in life or in death.” I think that Socrates, I am 
sure that Plato, did not really doubt the immor- 
tality of the soul, any more than they doubted 
the existence of God; but they knew that neither 
of these beliefs was absolutely essential to the 
truth of philosophy. Socrates was speaking still 
as a philosopher, but with his face turned to a 
diviner light, when in the same A pology he dwelt 
with loving faith on the joys to which he looked 
forward in a life untroubled by the evils of human 
injustice, and when, in the Phaedo, he comforted 
his friends with argument after argument to show 
that his faith was not irrational but confirmed 
by all the wisdom of experience. 

To these arguments he added a picture of what 
might be supposed to happen to the souls of the 
blessed in their future life, painting it with the 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 67 


brightest colours of the imagination, that it might 
be remembered by his disciples and work upon 


their minds as an “incantation” against the at-?"*"° 


tacks of incredulity. But a more powerful charm 
than any he could weave in words was the exam- 
ple of his own faith. It is not without design that 
Plato has joined together in one dialogue the most 
elaborate of his (or Socrates’) logical demonstra- 
tions of the immortal nature of the soul and the 
minute account of Socrates’ conversion to the 
Ideal philosophy and of his victorious death. It 
is as if Plato had said: Dispute if you will these 
arguments of Socrates for the soul’s eternity, 
since in sooth they cannot be made logic-proof; 
but look at the man himself, and, at the worst, no 
reasoning will be strong enough to persuade you 
that such a life was based on a delusion. Nor is 
there any inconsistency in the fact that imme- 
diately after pronouncing his “incantation” Soc- 
rates closed the conversation with a warning to 
his disciples against the mere acquiescence in 
authority, and with a command to reason these 
matters out for themselves in the light vouch- 
safed to them by their own souls, for, as Hesiod 
had written, “He is a good man who hearkens to 
counsel well spoken, but he is the best who thinks 
out all things for himself.’ 


21 Works and Days 293.—One is reminded of the last words of 
Buddha, which contain a similar command, based on a complex 


Phaedo 1158 


68 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


The reality of Plato’s belief in the immortality 
of the soul is open to no cavil; but the mischievous 
curiosity (periergia), as Plato would have called 
it, of the German mind has raised a question of 
a sort virtually to nullify that belief while pre- 
tending to render it griindlich. It was Hegel 
who started the trouble—Hegel, the fountain- 
head, one is bound to say, of a stream of meta- 
physics that has swamped with its muddy waters 
almost all the German and British Platonists of 
the nineteenth century. For the ease of my soul 
I borrow this statement of the case from one of 
the latest of the English Hegelianizers. In the 
Introduction to his edition of the Phaedo Mr. 
Archer-Hind observes: 


“Hegel, analysing the conception of immor- 
tality, seizes at once upon that which he regards as 
essential to the Platonic philosophy: this kernel 
he instantly drags to light, rejecting the husk of 
V orstellung. Whether an individual conscious- 
ness shall continue to exist as such is to Platonism 
of no metaphysical importance whatever: what is 
of importance is to grasp the true nature of eter- 
nity. The soul’s real immortality lies in the oper- 
ation of thought: eternity is in the nature of 
thought and has nothing to do with duration.” 
of scepticism and affirmation seemingly so different from that of 
Socrates, yet more like than different if rightly understood: “And 
now, O priests, I take my leave of you; all the constituents of 


being are transitory; work out your salvation with diligence” 
(Warren, Buddhism in Translations 109). 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 69 


From Hegel our British editor passes to 'Teich- 
miller, who, as he says, “goes further, and de- 
clares that Plato could not maintain individual 
immortality without grave inconsistency; from 
which premise he most justly draws the conclu- 
sion that Plato did not maintain it.” Mr. Archer- 
Hind’s own position is in accord with Hegel’s in 
so far as he holds with Hegel that “the duration 
of the individual is of no metaphysical import- 
ance [metaphysics, however, is of supreme im- 
portance to the Hegelian]:... Plato’s philosophy 
in no way involves it.” He further agrees with 
Teichmiiller in holding “that any interpretation 
of Plato which attributes inconsistency to him 
stands self-condemned”’; but he softens this asser- 
tion by adding that Plato’s thought, though fun- 
damentally consistent, shows a regular develop- 
ment: in the T%maeus, which expresses Plato’s 
mature views, “personal immortality does more 
or less [he means decidedly more] recede into 
the region of the mythical: it enters only in an 
extremely allegorical guise”; but in the Phaedo, 
he is willing to admit, “although Plato knew very 
well that neither he nor any one else could de- 
monstrate the immortality of individual souls, 
yet he was strongly disposed to believe, at least 
at the time the Phaedo was written, that every 
soul on its separation from the body will not be 
reabsorbed in the universal, but will survive as 


70 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


a conscious personality, even as it existed before 
its present incarnation.” Now of the pantheism 
and metaphysical monism which Mr. Archer- 
Hind discovers in the Timaeus it will be time to 
speak in a later chapter; here we may venture 
the assertion that they rest on a mistaken notion 
of Plato’s use of mythology. For the concession 
in regard to the Phaedo let us be grateful; it is 
not often that your metaphysician, indurated in 
this school, grants anything to the pleas of hu- 
manity and common-sense. And in return we 
also can make a concession; the physical and the 
metaphysical arguments of the Phaedo, if taken 
without the Ideal argument, might leave the door 
open to a pseudo-transcendental interpretation; 
they turn on an ontological conception of soul in 
the abstract and have only an indirect bearing on 
the question of personal endurance. But to leave 
out the Ideal argument is simply to leave out 
Plato. 

For us this over-wise grasping at the meta- 
physical discursions in Plato’s system seems to 
begin with Hegel, but in fact it goes back to the 
Neoplatonists, from whom it came to the German 
transcendentalists through Boehme, perhaps, and 
other mystical enthusiasts of the sort. The source 
of the error may be found in such a passage as 
this from the opening of the fourth book of the 
fourth Ennead of Plotinus: 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 71 


“What then will the soul say, and of what 
things will it have memory, in the world of reason 
and when it has its life in pure being? We are 
obliged to say that it contemplates those things 
and has its activity in those things wherein it has 
its being; otherwise it would not be there. How 
then of the things of its life in this world, as that 
it was devoted to philosophy, and that even while 
here it was looking to that other world,—will it 
remember none of these? No. For if, when one 
is engaged in the act of pure reason, it is impos- 
sible to have any other activity than that of rea- 
son and contemplation and in this act of reason 
there is included no reflection on one’s self as hav- 
ing reasoned, but such reflection, would come 
later, if it came at all, and would appertain to 
one who had already passed from that activity of 
pure reason,—if this be true, as it is true, then 
when we are wholly in the world of pure reason, 
we have no memory of the things that happened 
to us here, whatever our life may have been. And 
if, as We Suppose, pure reason is all timeless, since 
the things of that world are in eternity but not 
in time, it is impossible that there should be 
memory there of anything whatsoever, much less 
of the things of this world.” 


Now, however this sort of transcendentalism 
may have imped itself out in Platonic feathers, 
and however possible it may be to gather hints 
from Plato of some ultimate restoration of the 


498pD 


712 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


soul to a timeless eternity, such abstractions have 
no place in his highly concrete thoughts of im- 
mortality, nor indeed, one may make bold to say, 
in any thoughts of immortality that have meaning 
for a human soul. Instead of looking forward to 
a future life of empty contemplation divested of 
memory, Plato regards memory as one of the chief 
proofs of immortality; instead of idealizing a 
state of being without self-consciousness, the 
highest aim of his philosophy is that a man should 
come to know himself. To say that “Plato’s 
philosophy in no way involves the duration of the 
individual” is to turn page after page of his writ- 
ings into mere trifling. Was Socrates saying 
something that had no connexion with his gen- 
uine belief and Plato’s, and was he jesting, 
when at the end of his Apology he spoke of meet- 
ing the illustrious dead in the world to which he 
was going and of conversing with them? I think 
he meant his words to be taken as simply as any 
Christian’s faith is to be taken. Did Plato write 
with tongue in his cheek when in the Phaedo he 
reports the hope of Socrates—or rather the one 
thing of which he has no doubt—that his soul is 
about to pass into the presence of gods who shall 
judge not as men do, but justly and righteously ‘ 
And in The Republic was he mocking us, when 
he makes Socrates encourage his young friends at 
one of the critical points of their debate by bid- 


JUSTICE AND THE SOUL 13 


ding them remember that, though the scoffer may 
remain unconvinced, they will at least be prepar- 
ing their own souls against the time when in some 
other world they may come together once more 
and argue over these same matters?” 

No, the attempt to banish personal immor- 
tality from Plato’s religion is of a piece with the 
rejection of personality from his conception of 
God; it follows the effort to inject a Neoplatonic 
and Teutonic metaphysic into his philosophy, or, 
when all concessions are made, to lay a completely 
false stress on the hints of such a metaphysic 
scattered here and there in the wide circle of his 
speculation. There can be no right understand- 
ing of Platonism until the mind has been swept 
clean of this whole metaphysical obsession. 

The highest reach of Plato’s philosophy, con- 
fining the word to what may be called the human 
element of religion, we have found in the 
Phaedrus and the Symposiwm, the Phaedo and 
The Republic; for his theology we turn now to 
the discourse on God and Providence inserted in 
the Laws as a kind of general preamble. Tak- 
ing the word philosophy in the larger sense as 
an equivalent for the whole circle of religion, we 


™ His éxelvov tov Biov, drav aiOis yevouevor trois rTovovrois 
evTuxwpev Adyos. So, with a pretty change of évtvywpuev for 
évrvxwo., James Adam dedicates his noble edition of The Re- 
public to the memory of a friend. 


74 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


may close this chapter with the words of Atticus, 
one of the soundest of the later Platonizers: “If 
the soul is not immortal, then there is no remin- 
iscence [from antenatal association with Ideas]. 
If there is no reminiscence, then there is no acqui- 
sition of knowledge. ‘Therefore, as all the dog- 
mas of Plato really hang and depend on the di- 
vine nature and immortality of the soul, he who 
rejects this truth overthrows the entire fabric 
of Plato’s philosophy.’’** 

8 Hi de oy eorw 7 Wrxn abavaros, ovde avaurvnors. ei S€ wy 
TovTo, ovde pdOynors. mavtTwv otv tov TAdrwvos BS0ypdTwv 
arexvOs é&nptymevwv Kal Exkpepapevwov THS Kata THY Wrynv Oedr- 


ntos TE kal aBavacias, 6 yn TVYXWpOV ToOUTO THY TacaV dvarpereL 
pirocopiay HAdrwvos (Apud Eusebius, Praep. Ev. XV, ix, 5). 


CHAPTER IV 


THEOLOGY 
TRANSLATION FROM THE LAWS, BOOK X 


[The tenth book of the Laws, virtually the 
whole of which follows in translation, is inserted 
by Plato as a preamble to the particular statutes 
regarding impiety. It really forms an independ- 
ent treatise of theology, put into the mouth of 
an unnamed Athenian who is conversing with a 
Lacedaemonian and a Cretan friend. ‘To some 
scholars the theses here presented seem a deroga- 
tion from Plato’s purer philosophy, even a senile 
concession to popular superstition; to others, in- 
cluding myself, they seem indispensable to a 
rounded view of Plato’s religion. I take this oc- 
casion to call attention to Tayler Lewis’s edition 
and interpretation of this book in his Plato 
Against the Atheists, an admirable but now, I 
fear, little known example of the older American 
scholarship. ] 


No one who believes in the gods as law and 
custom ordain has ever voluntarily done an im- 
pious deed or uttered a lawless word. If he 
has done so it is for one of three reasons: either 
he does not believe in the existence of the gods, 

75 


8858 


76 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


as I said, or, secondly, he believes that they exist 
but have no care for men, or, thirdly, that they 
are placable and can be turned from their course 
by sacrifices and prayers. 

Now I can imagine such men girding at us and 
saying: “You gentlemen of Athens and Lacedae- 
mon and Crete speak the truth. Some of us deny 
the very existence of the gods, whilst others of us 
believe about them as you say. And we hold 
that before you begin your harsh threatening 
you should try to persuade and teach us, on good 
evidence, that the gods exist and that they are 
too good to be diverted by gifts and charms from 
their course of justice. For now, hearing such 
and suchlike accounts of them from highly ac- 
credited poets and orators and prophets and 
priests and others without number, most of us 
have no incentive to abandon our evil practices, 
but sin and then look for healing. From law- 
givers' who pretend to be humane rather than 
severe we demand first that you should use some 
persuasion with us, speaking at least with more 
conviction of truth than other men even if you 


1 Two things should be remembered in connexion with this word. 
In many of the Greek city-states the Constitution was the work 
of some actual or mythical reformer of the government, so that 
“lawgiver” for Plato’s readers would be a synonym for the 
very principle of law and custom. And, secondly, the three inter- 
locutors of this dialogue are discussing the Constitution to be 
provided for a city which is to be newly founded in Crete. 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 17 


cannot discourse more eloquently concerning the 
existence of the gods; and so perhaps we might 
believe you. Try then, if what we say is reason- 
able, to meet our challenge.” 

Now it may seem an easy matter to express the 
simple truth that the gods exist. First there are 
the earth and the sun, the stars and the universe, 
and this beautiful arrangement of the seasons 
by the division of years and months; and there is 
the fact that all Greeks and barbarians believe 
in the existence of the gods. Yet I am afraid 
that evil-minded men—I would never say I am 
ashamed—will rather despise us. For you do 
not understand the cause of their quarrel with us, 
but imagine that their souls are driven to a life 
of impiety by nothing but the intemperance of 
pleasures and desires. You quite overlook an- 
other cause,—it has escaped your notice on ac- 
count of your remote position,—and that is a 
certain ingrained state of ignorance which pre- 
sents itself as the highest wisdom. ‘There are 
writings among us Athenians concerning the 
gods, such as I understand are not found among 
you of Lacedaemon and Crete owing to the ex- 
cellence of your Constitution, some in metre, 
some in prose, the most ancient of which deal 
with the origin of the heavens and the world in 
general; and from this they proceed forthwith to 
describe the birth of the gods and their behaviour 


886 


887c 


78 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


when born. Now, however such writings may 
benefit or harm the reader in other respects, their 
very antiquity makes it no light matter to cen- 
sure them; I can only say that, so far as they 
have any influence on the service and honour due 
to parents, I have never found anything useful 
or even in the least degree truthful to commend 
in them. Well, these tales of ancient things we 
may pass over without comment; I am ready to 
hear of them whatever will please the gods. Our 
business is to hold the writings of our wise mod- 
erns to account for whatever evils they may have 
caused. ‘The works of such writers have this ef- 
fect: when you and I mention the evidence for the 
existence of the gods, brmging forward the sun 
and moon, and the stars and earth, as being gods 
and godlike, our youths, who have hearkened to 
these wise men, declare that such objects are no 
more than earth and stones with no power to 
heed the doings of mankind. ... 

To the point then. How shall we argue for 
the existence of the gods without indignation? 
For there is a certain compulsion upon us to be 
outraged and to hate those who have been and 
are the occasion of this discussion, by their in- 
credulous rejection of the myths which as young 
children and nurslings they heard from their 
mothers and nurses,—heard them indeed recited 
in sportive songs and serious chants, and in 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 79 


prayers that accompany the sacrifice, and at the 
same time beheld such sights as a child delights 
in seeing and hearing, when his parents are at the 
altar and are most earnestly concerned for them- 
selves and their children, addressing themselves 
to the gods in prayer and petition as if the gods 
certainly existed. So too these sceptics see and 
hear all men, Greeks and barbarians, in all times 
of calamity and good fortune, making protesta- 
tions and supplications at the rising and the set- 
ting of the sun and the moon, not as if there were 
no gods but as if they surely were, and without 
the slightest suspicion to the contrary. When we 
are obliged to talk with men who show contempt 
for these signs, with no pretense of argument, as 
any one must admit who has the least spark of 
reason in him, it may be hard to find gentle words 
for our admonition and instruction in the ele- 
mentary truth that the gods exist. Yet some- 
how we must make the venture; for it is a sad 
state of affairs if half of mankind is to be mad 
with the frenzy of pleasure, and the other half 
with indignation at them. So then let the prelude 
to our argument be free of anger against those 
who are thus perverted in their understanding, 
and let us say gently, quenching our indignation, 
as if we were here conversing with one of these 
men: peel 
My son, you are young, and advancing age will 


888 


80 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


cause you to change many of your present opin- 
ions for quite contrary views. Wait then until 
such a time before you set yourself up as judge 
in matters of the greatest moment; and the great- 
est matter of all is what you now take so lightly, 
viz. how the good or ill of a man’s life depends 
on his right conception of the gods. And first I 
can tell you one great fact concerning them with- 
out fear of contradiction; it is this: you are not 
alone in your view of the gods, neither have you 
and your friends invented it, but there has been 
always a greater or less number of men who suf- 
fer from this disease. I myself have known many 
such, and I can say this to you, that not one of 
those who imbibed in youth a disbelief in the ex- 
istence of the gods has ever persisted in this 
opinion to his old age.* The two states of mind 
regarding the gods that do persist—not indeed 
with many, but they do persist with some—are 
these: that the gods exist but have no care for hu- 
man affairs, and, what may follow, that they care 
but are easily placated by sacrifice and prayer. 


2 How is this statement to be reconciled with the words of 
891n, to the effect that the arguments of atheism are scattered 
broadcast? Does Plato mean that philosophers of mature years 
are not sincere in their rejection of the gods? Or does this 
passage refer to laymen, while atheistic philosophers form a 
small class by themselves, whose practical influence is limited to the 
young? And even the philosophers, e.g. the forerunners of Epi- 
curus, admitted the existence of the gods, though practically they 
were atheists. 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 81 


If you hearken to me, you will wait until your 
opinion concerning them has grown as clear as 
may be, considering the while whether the matter 
stands thus or otherwise, and making inquiry of 
others and more particularly of the lawgiver. 
In the intervening time you had better not ven- 
ture upon any impiety towards the gods; cer- 
tainly he who makes the laws for you will do his 
best, now and in the future, to teach the truth of 
these things. 

This brings me to say that without foreseeing 
it we have been led on to consider a remarkable 
theory, what is regarded by many as the wisest 
of all theories. ‘There are men who avow that 
all things, present, past, and future, come to 
pass by nature, or by art, or through chance. 
It may be assumed that wise men know what 
they are talking about; yet I propose to follow 
them up and examine the views of their party. 
These hold that the greatest and fairest works 
appear to be of nature and chance, whereas the 
lesser works are of art [i.e. design], which, re- 
ceiving the creation of the great and primary 
works from nature, forms and fashions all those 
lesser things which are commonly called artificial. 
To speak more plainly: fire and water and earth 
and air, they say, all have their being by nature 
and by chance, and none of them by art [i.e. de- 
sign], while the bodies next after these, as we see 


889 


82 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


them in the earth and sun and moon and stars, 
have come into being through the action of these 
elements, which are altogether without soul. The 
elements, moving each with the chance of energy 
in it, by a kind of affinity as they fall together, 
warm with cold or dry with moist and soft with 
hard, and all the other inevitable mixtures of op- 
posites blended by chance, have thus and in this 
manner created the whole heavens and every 
thing in the heavens, as well as all animals and 
plants; whence also are the various seasons. 
There is no mind at work in this, nor any god, 
nor art, but, as I say, it all happens by nature and 
chance. Art, they maintain, is altogether a pos- 
terior production from these, and, mortal itself 
and of mortal birth, at a later date has brought 
forth certain toys of creation, which have little 
substance of truth but are rather idols or insub- 
stantial forms, of mortal kinship, such as are pro- 
duced by painting and music and the other arts 
of this class. If there are arts that produce any- 
thing serious, they are such as medicine and hus- 
bandry and gymnastics, which associate their 
power with nature. As for statecraft, they say 
that only a small part of it has any association 
with nature, but that for the most part it belongs 
to art; wherefore law-making as a whole is not of 
nature but of art, whose statutes lack veracity. 
Hence these men begin with the statement that 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 83 


the gods exist by art, not by nature but as a 
product of laws which vary in various localities 
as men happen to come to agreement in their 
lawmaking. Furthermore, one class of objects 
is beautiful by nature and another class ‘by law. 
As for the justice so-called of things, it has noth- 
ing at all to do with nature, but men are always 
in dispute with one another about it and changing 
their views; and as their view happens to be at 
any time they make this their criterion of justice, 
which is thus a product of art and of the laws with 
no basis in the nature of things. 

These, my friends, are the opinions current 
everywhere among our youth, formulated by wise 
men who declare that the ideal of justice is that 
which any one can make to prevail by force. 
Whence impiety and irreligion lay hold of our 
youth, as if there were no gods such as the law 
prescribes and we ought to believe. Whence 
also factions arise, instigated by those who draw 
men to a life supposed to be right according to 
nature, which is in truth to live by dominating 
others and not by subordinating one’s self to 
others in accordance with law.* 

3 One may recall the warning words of Bishop Butler (Preface 
to Sermons): “A late author [Wollaston] of great and deserved 
reputation says, that to place virtue in following nature, is at 
best a loose way of talk. And he has reason to say this, if what 


I think he intends to express, though with great decency, be true, 
that scarce any other sense can be put upon these words, but act- 


890 


891n 


84 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


What then, under these long-standing condi- 
tions, ought the lawgiver to do? Can he only 
stand up in the city and denounce his threats 
against those who deny the gods or do not think 
about them as the law prescribes? And so of 
what is beautiful and just and of all the greatest 
things and the forces making for virtue and vice, 
can he only command men to fashion their con- 
duct and belief in accordance with the written 
prescriptions of the lawgiver, pronouncing the 
death penalty against any one who does not show 
himself amenable to the laws, or punishment by 
stripes and bonds, or by deprivation of rights, as 
the case may be, or by poverty and exile? Is 
there no power of persuasion over men, which 
he can adapt to his words while uttering the laws, 
and so temper the wild hearts to some degree? 
... If the arguments of atheism were not scat- 
tered, so to speak, among all men, there would 
be no need of our reasoning in defense of the 
gods’ existence; but now we are obliged to do so. 
For when the laws of the greatest moment are 
corrupted by evil men, whose business is it but 
the lawgiver’s to come to their rescue? 

Now when a man expresses such views as we 
have described, it is a fair inference that he holds 
fire and water and earth and air to be the first 


ing as any of the several parts, without distinction, of a man’s 
nature happened most to incline him,” 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 85 


of all things, and calls them by the name of na- 
ture, regarding the soul as a later production 
from them. Rather, it is no inference, but this 
is the unequivocal meaning of his words. And 
what if we have discovered here the very foun- 
tain-head of the irrational theorizing in which 
the students of natural science have ever been 
indulging!* Examine the whole argument care- 
fully; for it is no slight matter if these inventors 
of impious arguments, and leaders of other men, 
should turn out to be employing no sound but 
quite erroneous reasoning. My refutation may 
appear to take an unusual line, but I maintain that 
these arguments tending to impiety in the soul 
really invert the order of existence. That which 
is the primary cause of the generation and cor- 
ruption of all things, they declare to be not pri- 
mary but secondary in origin, and what has arisen 
later they declare to be primary; whence their 
error in regard to the real being of the gods. All 
but a very few men seem to be ignorant of the 
character and power of the soul; and their ig- 
norance touches not only its other properties but 
the truth of its generation, that it is among the 
primary things, having come into being before all 


4This is precisely the issue today between religion and the 
Darwinian philosophy of evolution. On a man’s answer to the 
question will depend his tendency towards a spiritual or a ma- 
terialistic life. 


892 


86 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


material bodies, whose every change and commu- 
tation it certainly controls. And if this is so and 
soul is more ancient than body, does it not follow 
inevitably that the properties and affections of 
soul would antecede those of body? Hence 
opinion and attention and reason and art and 
law would be prior to distinctions of hard and 
soft and heavy and light. So too the great and 
primary works and actions would belong to soul, 
just as they are primary, whereas things natural 
and nature herself, whose very name has a false 
implication, would be posterior and subject to 
art and reason. Nature to them signifies genera- 
tion in the primary instance; but if soul shall ap- 
pear to be primary, then neither fire nor air, but 
soul, being primary in generation, might with a 
more exquisite propriety be called “natural” by 
distinction. Such are the conclusions we reach, 
if we demonstrate that soul is more ancient than 
body, but not otherwise. ... 


[The Athenian now proceeds to his demon- 
stration of the priority of soul. To this end he 
analyses motion into ten categories. These in- 
clude, first, the two mechanical motions of a body 
revolving upon its axis and of a body changing its 
position; then the six constitutive motions, which 
affect the parts, or constitution, of a body, viz. 
combination, dissolution, increase, diminution, 
generation, corruption; and, finally, two quali- 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 87 


tative distinctions, viz. (1) the transmitted mo- 
tion of a body which moves another and is itself 
moved by another, and (2) the self-originating 
motion of a body which moves itself and another. 
Now it will be seen that the eight mechanical and 
constitutive forms of motion can be subsumed 
under the two qualitative categories, and it is 
clear that all self-originating motion is primary, 
whereas transmitted motion is secondary. That 
is to say, so long as one body is moved by an- 
other, and that by another, we have an endless 
chain of transmitted motion, without beginning 
or cause. The cause and beginning must be in 
self-originating motion, the most ancient and 
powerful principle of life and change. To this 
self-originating motion, this principle of life and 
change, men everywhere give the name of “soul,” 
whereas that which has no original power of mo- 
tion in itself, but merely transmits motion, is 
“body,” or “matter.” Hence soul is prior to 
body, and body is secondary and later; in the 
nature of things soul is master and body is 
servant. | 

We remember our former admission that, if 
soul shall appear to be more ancient than body, 
then the properties and affections of soul will be 
antecedent to those of body. That is to say, char- 
acter and disposition and will and thought and 
true opinions and attention and memory will have 
come into being before length and breadth and 


896c 


88 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


depth and strength of bodies, if in fact soul 
antecedes body. As a consequence we must fur- 
ther admit that soul is the cause of goodness in 
things and of evil, of beauty and ugliness, justice 
and injustice, and all the contraries, if we reckon 
it the cause of all. Then if soul is the indwelling 
and ordering cause in all things that are in any 
way moved, must we not say that it orders the 
heavens also? We must. And shall we say one 
soul or more than one? I will take the liberty 
of saying more than one; not less than two at 
least we must suppose, the one beneficent, the 
other of contrary efficiency.” 


5This is a passage of dubious meaning, reverberations of 
which will be heard all through the later literature. In it a 
certain school of Platonists found a text for their theory of two 
souls in the universe, one good, the other evil. It was taken by 
Clement of Alexandria in a purely Pauline sense: “That the 
Devil so frequently mentioned in the barbarian [i.e. Christian] 
philosophy, the prince of the demons, is an evil-working soul, 
Plato says expressly in the tenth book of the Laws: ‘Then if soul 
... of contrary efficiency.’ In like vein he writes in the Phaedrus 
[24048]: ‘Now there are other evils, but with the most of them 
some demon has mixed immediate pleasure.’ Furthermore in 
the same tenth book of the Laws he clearly sets forth this senti- 
ment of the Apostle [Ephes. vi, 12]: ‘Our contest is not with 
flesh and blood, but with the principalities, with the powers, with 
the things spiritual of those in the heavens’; for his words are 
as follows [906a]: ‘We have already agreed that the heavens 
are filled with powers of good, many in number, and with con- 
trary powers, more numerous still than the good; and now we 
say that we are involved with these in a deathless battle needing 
a marvellous guard,” (Stromata V, xiv, 92 f.) Now whatever 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 89 


And thus soul draws and leads all things in 
heaven and on earth and in the sea by its own 
motions, which we call willing, viewing, attend- 
ing, considering, opining rightly and wrongly, 
itself rejoicing or grieving, courageous or fearful, 
hating or loving. All these and their kind are 
primary motions which take up the secondary 
motions of bodies, and so bring all things to in- 
crease and diminution and dissolution and com- 
position, and to the consequent properties of 
warm and cold, heavy and light, hard and soft, 
white and black, harsh and sweet. And in what- 
soever soul is engaged, if she takes to herself 
reason as her godlike helpmate, she guides every- 


Plato meant, he did not mean quite this. As we shall see when 
we come to the Timaeus, he regarded the soul of man dualistically, 
as containing in itself the impulses of desire which, in so far 
as unchecked they tend to endless expansion, are intrinsically 
evil, and the checking, controlling spirit which effects good out 
of them. In the phenomenal world there is a corresponding 
dualism of forces in themselves endlessly expansive and disorderly 
and of the divine will which checks and orders them; but there 
is here nothing to justify the theory of two cosmic souls, one 
good, the other evil. Apparently in the passage under con- 
sideration Plato is thinking rather vaguely of such celestial in- 
fluences, good and evil, as were to play so large a part in the 
astrology of the Gnostics and others. In general (see the pas- 
sage immediately following on page 897) Plato dwelt rather on 
the ordered motion of the heavenly bodies as a symbol and model 
of the order to be attained in the soul—I cannot quite follow the 
reasoning of Apelt who, in his note on this passage in his transla- 
tion of the Laws, dismisses this mention of an evil world-soul as 
rein hypothetisch. 


897 


90 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


thing rightly and happily; but if she takes unrea- 
son as her associate, all her works are of the op- 
posite character. 

What kind of soul then shall we say is lord of 
heaven and earth and all the revolving world? 
that which is wise and replete with virtue, or that 
which possesses neither of these qualities? If, as 
we say, the whole path and orbit of heaven and 
all things that move therein have a nature similar 
to the motion and revolution and calculations 
of reason and proceed in a manner akin to rea- 
son, then evidently the best soul cares for the 
universe and guides it in such a path as we see. 
But if they proceed in a crazed and disorderly 
manner, then the evil soul guides. The question 
raised involves the nature of the motion of rea- 
son, a question not easy to answer intelligently. 

In attempting our answer, therefore, we will 
not, like those who bring night into midday by 
gazing directly at the sun, suppose that with 
these our mortal eyes we can see reason and suf- 
ficiently understand it. Our safer course will be 
to look at an image of what we are seeking. And 
for this image we will take that one of the ten 
kinds of motion to which reason bears a resem- 
blance. Now, turning back to what we then said, 
we may recall this fact, that we first placed all 
things under the two categories of motion and 
rest. Then of things in motion we found that 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 91 


some move without change of position, while 
others are carried from one place to another. Of 
these two kinds of motion that which occurs with- 
out change of position must be motion about a 
centre, as in the case of objects made perfectly 
round by a lathe, and this, so far as we can make 
such a comparison, bears the closest resemblance 
to the revolution of reason. At least I hold it 
rather a neat sort of metaphor to compare rea- 
son and motion without change of position by say- 
ing that each moves in an unvarying course and 
manner in one place and about one centre and 
with unaltering relations and by one law and 
order; we think of the motion of reason as we 
do of the revolution of a smoothly rounded 
sphere. On the other hand motion that is not in 
an unvarying course and manner, nor in one 
place, nor about one centre, nor with unaltering 
relations, nor uniform, but without system or 
order or any law,—such motion is akin to all un- 
reason.° 

With these premises we are prepared to assert 
boldly that, since soul is that which turns all 


6 This argument may sound quaint and fanciful to the modern 
reader; but Plato’s thought is very much the same as Kant’s 
when he expressed his abiding wonder at the moral sense in 
man and at the motions of the stars in the heavens. It is the 
simple idea echoed by many of the poets who, like Dante and 
Matthew Arnold, have found symbols of strength and peace in 
the celestial orbits. 


898 


899 


92 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


things about, the revolution of the heavens must 
be undoubtedly the work of heedful and order- 
giving soul, whether the best soul or its opposite. 
Furthermore, in view of what has been said, it 
would be impious to suppose that such motion is 
bestowed by any other than soul endowed with 
all virtues, whether that soul be one or more 
than one. And still further, if soul guides the re- 
volution of all the celestial bodies—sun, moon, 
and the other stars—it must guide each of them 
individually; so that, if we direct our argument 
to one of these celestial bodies, what we say will 
apply equally to the rest of them. Now we all 
see the body of the sun, although no one sees its 
soul—nor indeed the soul of any other creature’s 
body living or dead! yet we have a strong con- 
viction that there does exist such a thing, too fine 
to be perceived by our corporeal senses, but per- 
ceptible to reason. Taking our stand then on 
reason alone and reflection, we can make this 
further point in confidence, that if soul guides the 
sun, it does so in one of three ways: either resid- 
ing within yonder visible spherical body it governs 
the moving mass, exactly in such manner as the 
soul in us causes all our motions; or having pro- 
vided itself with a body of fire or some form of 
air, as some maintain, it impels the sun forcibly 
from without, as body impels body; or, thirdly, 
being itself naked of body, but having certain 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 93 


other marvellous and incomprehensible powers, 
it acts as guide. Now, whether riding the sun 
as a chariot it brings light to all, or acting from 
without, or however and in whatever manner, 
this soul is of a nature superior to the sun, and 
every one must recognize it as a god. And so 
of all the stars and the moon, of the years and 
months and various seasons, our account will be 
the same. We shall say that, as soul or souls 
have been shown to be the cause of all these, and 
to be endowed with the excellence of every vir- 
tue, they are gods, whether residing in bodies as 
animate creatures, they govern the whole heaven, 
or in whatsoever manner. Let a man, any man, 
make these admissions and he will never endure 
the idea that all things are not replete with 
gods. ui. 


We have, I think, sufficiently answered the 
first class of objectors. Our next argument must 
be directed to the man who acknowledges the ex- 
istence of the gods, but holds that they have 
no care for the affairs of mankind. To such an 
one we will say: My good sir, in respect of your 
acknowledgment of the gods, no doubt something 
within you akin to the divine leads you to honour 
and acknowledge its kind; but the fortunes of 
evil and unjust men, in public and private life, 


7 This is the saying as old as Thales: ravta wAnpyn Oeav. 


900 


90138 


94 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 
(ae 


not truly happy, but held to be happy in the 
exaggerated opinions of the undiscerning, and 
celebrated without regard to fact in song and 
tales of every sort,—these are the things that 
have brought you to impiety. Or perhaps you 
have seen wicked old men reaching their term of 
years and leaving their children’s children in the 
highest honours, and are amazed at the sight; 
or you are troubled by the stories you have heard, 
or by the spectacle before your own eyes, of men 
frequently raising themselves from small estate 
to tyranny and exalted place by their acts of im- 
pious and high-handed wrong. And with these 
things happening, manifestly you are unwilling, 
by reason of that inner kinship, to blame the gods 
as responsible for such events. And so, in your 
inability either to reason the matter out or to 
think ill of the gods, you have fallen into this 
state of mind, wherein you admit their existence, 
but believe they despise and disregard the affairs 
of mankind. 

So much we might say to our bewildered youth, 
lucky indeed if we can find words to exorcize 
such a belief before it passes into a worse form 
of impiety. And in the first place it ought not 
to be difficult to draw from him the admission 
that the gods are not less careful of the little 
things, that if anything they are more careful of 
them, than of the great and conspicuous. ... For 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 95 


suppose some one has a certain task to perform, 
a task that requires particular care, and suppose 
that his mind pays heed to the great matters in- 
volved but neglects the small, can we find any 
good reason for commending him? Consider the 
question. Whether god or man be the agent, 
there can be only two explanations of such a 
course of action: either he thinks it will make no 
difference to the whole if the small matters are 
neglected, or he sees the difference but is neglect- 
ful by reason of effeminate slackness.° 

Now there are three of us here, and we may 
issue this challenge both to the believer in the 
gods who thinks they are easily placated and to 
the believer who thinks them neglectful of small 
things. To begin with, you both say that the 
gods know and see and hear all things, that noth- 
ing is hid from them of which there can be per- 
ception and knowledge. Further, you say all 
things are possible to them within the power of 
mortals and immortals. Still more, we all, the 
five of us, have agreed that they are good, and 
supremely good. How then can we possibly ad- 
mit that they, being such as we believe them to 


8 For paduula kal tpvpy I have taken a phrase from Paradise 
Lost, xi, 630: “From man’s effeminate slackness it begins.” 
Rhathymia (easiness of temper, indolence, laziness, slackness) is 
a word that becomes more and more important in the Greek 
theories of evil, from Plato to Chrysostom. 


902 


96 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


be, approach any work in the spirit of effeminate 
slackness? . . . No, it can only be that, if they 
neglect what is small and slight in relation to the 
whole, they do so, either because they know they 
have no reason to attend to any such thing—or, 
is there any other alternative but ignorance? 

And so we renew our question: My good sir, 
shall we take you as averring that the gods are 
ignorant and through ignorance neglect what 
they ought to heed, or that, knowing their duty, 
they resemble those very wretched men who, as 
we say, know the better things, yet do the worse 
by reason of their subjection to pleasures and 
pains? Certainly neither this nor that. Now 
the affairs of mankind belong to the animate part 
of nature, and man himself is the most religious 
of all living creatures. We assert, too, that all 
mortal creatures, including the whole orb of 
heaven, are the possession, as it were, the herd, 
of the gods. Let a man, then, say that these 
things are great to the gods, or small, in either 
case would it behoove our owners, our shepherds 
as it were, being of nature most heedful and good, 
to neglect us? 

And we may look at the matter in another 
way. Perception and power are by nature con- 
trary one to the other in respect of ease and dif- 
ficulty. ‘That is to say, it is more difficult to see 
and hear small things than great, whereas it is 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 97 


easier for any one to carry and master and care 
for the small slight things than the contrary. 
A physician, for instance, who has been called in 
to cure the whole body, will scarcely succeed in 
his business if, being willing and having the 
power to care for the great symptoms, he neglects 
the lesser members and symptoms. And the 
same may be said of a pilot or general or hus- 
bandman or statesman or any other manager 
who cares for the many and great matters to the 
neglect of the few and small. Just as a mason 
will tell you that the large stones will not lie well 
without little ones. Let us, therefore, not hold 
God in less account than mortal artificers, who, 
as they are more skilled, so more exactly and per- 
fectly with their single art finish what is small 
and what is great in the tasks set them; neither 
let us suppose that God, the most wise, being 
willing and having the power to attend, heeds the 
great things, but neglects those little things which 
are the more easily heeded, like some feckless and 
lazy artificer who grows slack over his toil. Such 
an opinion of the gods we will never admit; to 
think thus of them would be neither holy nor 
veracious. 

And now at last we may seem to have talked 
to some purpose with the man who likes to charge 
the gods with neglect. Nevertheless, as our ar- 
guments hitherto have been rather of the sort 


903 


98 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


to force him against his will to confess error, I 
think we ought now to apply certain myths as 
charms to his mind. Let us persuade the young 
man, if words may avail, that all things have 
been ordered by God, who has the world in care, 
to the salvation and virtue of the whole, each 
member passively and actively contributing its 
part according to its ability. Over this multiform 
world rulers have been set to govern sectionally 
down to the smallest detail of what must be suf- 
fered and done, to the end that each section may 
be brought to its appointed consummation. Of 
this system, O wretched man, thou art a single 
part, which looks to the whole and tends to that, 
though in itself of the least magnitude; yet it 
has not occurred to thee that in such a system 
every part of creation has its birth to the end 
that the life and being of the whole may enjoy 
happiness, not the whole for thee, but thou for 
it. For every physician and every skilled artificer 
does all things for all, yet, having his eye on what 
tends to the common good, executes the part 
for the whole and not the whole for the part. 
But thou art vexed, not understanding how that 
which happens to thee is best for the whole and 
for thee, so far as the common creation permits. 
And since a soul, appointed now to one body, now 
to another, is forever undergoing all kinds of 
change, by reason of itself or of another soul, 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 99 


nothing remains for the draught-player to do 
but to move to a better place that character which 
has grown better, and that which has grown worse 
to a worse place, according to the merit of each, 
that it may obtain such a lot as behooves it. 
Enough has been said, I think, to show how 
easily the gods may care for all things. For if, 
looking to the animate part of creation, the crea- 
tor proceeded by a continual change of all things, 
transforming fire, for instance, into cool water, 
and making a multitude of things out of one or 
one out of a multitude, then by the first or second 
or third transformation there would result an in- 
finite mass of change; but as it is now, he who 
cares for the whole enjoys a marvellous ease.” In 
this way. Since our king sees the soul at work 
everywhere, and in all its deeds much of virtue 
and much of vice, and both soul and body, like the 


9I am very much in doubt about the meaning of this diffi- 
cult passage. Various emendations have been proposed, none of 
which is quite satisfactory. My translation is based on the sup- 
position that Plato is contrasting two ways in which the world- 
ruler might deal with souls in accordance with their deserts. He 
might so contrive the changes in the inanimate world that each 
soul at any moment should be properly placed in respect of its 
vice and virtue. This would be the difficult way and would result 
in infinite perturbations of the natural order; it is the way de- 
scribed above, and rejected. The other way would preserve the 
regularity of the inanimate world, and would change the place 
of the souls in this world according to their growth in vice and 
virtue. This is the method of Providence he now proceeds to 
describe. 


904 


100 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


popular gods, not eternal, but indestructible (for 
there would be no birth of living creature if either 
of them should perish), and since he understands 
that the good of the soul is by nature always 
beneficent and the evil injurious—perceiving all 
this, he has contrived that each member of the 
living world be so placed as most easily and ef- 
fectively to render virtue victorious and vice de- 
feated. ‘To this end he has contrived that the 
character developed by us should determine the 
character of our seat and the place occupied by 
us at any time; but the development of our par- 
ticular character he has left to the will of each of 
us. As a man desires and as is the character of 
his soul, such and in such manner, for the most 
part, each of us is born.” 

10 Cf. Phaedo 107p and Republic 6188.—This is also the later 
Christian theory, although with a difference. For Plato change and 
imperfection are inherent in the original substance of soul, and it 
lies within the will of each of us to direct our metamorphoses to 
ever better or ever baser states. The Christian attributed this 
principle of change to the fact that the soul was created, like all 
things else, ex nihilo; the very act of creation is a transition from 
not-being to being, and is thus the cause and beginning of a 
state of endless mutation. But the Christian, who is bound by 
his creed to believe that creation as the work of God is in- 
trinsically without blemish, refuses to see the cause of evil in 
the condition of mutability itself; he exonerates the creator by 
assuming that the principle of change in the creature assumes 
the form of a voluntary and uncaused declination away from 
God. (See, e.g., Athanasius, Contra Gentiles, and Gregory of 


Nyssa, Catechetical Oration.) We shall have more to say of this 
subject in another place. 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 101 


All things, therefore, change that partake of 
soul, having the cause of mutation within them- 
selves, and as they change they are moved about 
by the order and law of destiny. When the 
alteration in their character is slight, their change 
is small and, so to speak, on the same level; when 
it is great and much of injustice enters, they fall 
into a deep place and into those lower regions 
which under the names of Hades and the like fill 
us with terror, and haunt our dreams in this world 
and in our disembodied existence. Thus it hap- 
pens, when the soul by its own vehement will or 
by the strong influence of others partakes in 
larger measure of vice or virtue, if by associa- 
tion with divine virtue it becomes greatly virtu- 
ous there is a great change in its place, a change 
altogether for holiness, as it is carried into a bet- 
ter home; but if it develops otherwise, the seat 
of its life is changed accordingly. 

This, my brave young son, who think you are 
neglected by the gods, “this,” as Homer says, “is 
the justice of the gods who inhabit Olympus”— 
that he who grows in vice shall make his journey 
to the more vicious souls, and that he who grows 
in virtue shall journey to the more virtuous souls, 
receiving in life and in all his deaths such treat- 
ment as it behooves like to receive from like. 
Think not that you or any other shall ever 
escape this justice or shall ever boast to have out- 


905 


102 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


witted the gods; above all other laws of justice 
this law has been ordained by those who have 
ordained, and it were well to heed it with all 
care. For never shall you be unheeded by it; 
neither in your littleness shall you so sink into the 
bowels of the earth, nor in your exaltation shall 
you mount in flight to the heavens, but you shall 
pay the fitting vengeance of the gods, either while 
abiding here, or when you have made your jour- 
ney to Hades, or have been conveyed to some 
place more savage than these. And the same 
reckoning is to be made of those whom you have 
seen raising themselves from little to great by im- 
pious deeds or other wickedness; it has seemed 
to you that their state was a change from misery 
to happiness, and so, looking upon their deeds, 
you have thought to behold, as reflected in a mir- 
rour, the total neglect of the gods, knowing not in 
what way the lives of such men pay contribution 
to the sum of things. Yet this above all you 
ought to know, you who are so bold; for without 
this knowledge a man shall never see the type and 
form of life,” neither shall he have any right to 

11To the word rtvzos, “type and form,” Lewis appends the 
note: “That is, without this doctrine of the end of the wicked, 
and of the manner in which the present suspension and the final 
infliction of their doom contribute to the universal harmony, life 
would have no meaning. It would be Tohu and Bohu (Genesis 


i, 2), a moral chaos on which no intelligible form had been im- 
pressed.”—Thus we have the two orders. The phenomenal world 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 103 


offer an opinion touching its happiness and un- 
happy chances. If you will hearken to us, a sen- 
ate of old men, who tell you that you know not 
what you are saying about the gods, God himself 
will be your good helper. But if you are still 
waiting for the word of conviction, then, if there 
is any mind in you at all, listen to what we say 
to the third sceptic. For that the gods exist and 
that they pay heed to men, I think we have suf- 
ficiently demonstrated. The third point, that 
they can be placated by unjust men with bribing 
gifts, we must yield to no one, but rather must 
disprove by every means within our power. 

Come then, by the gods themselves, in what 
way would they be placated by us, if so be they 
are placated? Who and what would they be? 
Rulers at least they are, if in their hands lies the 


is a sphere of mechanical law established on the flux, but our 
place in this world is changed and determined by the gods in ac- 
cordance with our conduct. The material world in itself is heed- 
less of our wants—as Euripides says: “It profits us not at all 
to be vexed with things, for it matters nothing to them”—but 
the Providence of the gods is just. There is the physical law 
of things and there is the moral law of souls, and these two 
laws, so far as our limited vision reaches, seem to run side by 
side without causal nexus or composition. So it is that, accord- 
ing as our interest and concern are set on one of these laws, 
the other law will appear to us as a sphere of unreality. For an 
eloquent disquisition on the illusion of the phenomenal world and 
the eternal reality of the moral order as they strike on the re- 
ligious imagination, see the peroration (p. 729 ff) of Chrysostom’s 
seventy-sixth Homily on Matthew. 


906 


104 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


management of all this expanded world. But 
rulers of what sort would they resemble? ‘To 
whom may we fairly liken them, comparing great 
things with small? Would they be such as drivers 
of racing teams, or as pilots of vessels? Or per- 
haps they might be likened to rulers of armies, 
or to physicians who wage war against diseases 
of the body, or to farmers who in fear for their 
crops watch the customary bad seasons, or per- 
haps to keepers of herds. We have already 
agreed that the heavens are filled with powers of 
good, many in number, and with contrary powers, 
more numerous still than the good; and now we 
say that we are involved with these in a deathless 
battle needing a marvellous guard, and that the 
gods and daemons” together are our allies and 
we on the other hand are the property of the 
gods and daemons. Injustice and insolence with 
folly are our ruin, whereas our salvation is jus- 
tice and temperance with wisdom, which last have 
their habitation with the soul-powers of the gods, 
yet here too in some small measure are seen to 
dwell with us. Nevertheless, so it is said, cer- 
tain souls, manifestly brutish, dwelling on earth 
and enjoying the profits of evil-domg, pay homage 
to the souls of the guardians (whether we liken 

12 The reader needs scarcely to be reminded that in classical 


Greek the word daemon means a power lower than the gods, but 
not maleficent. 


THE LAWS, BOOK X 105 


these to dogs or shepherds or see them quite as 
the supreme lords), and so use the persuasion of 
flattering words and of magic prayers as to win 
the right to grasp at any advantage among men, 
yet suffer no harm. Such at least is the rumour 
spread by the wicked. But we say that this evil 
of grasping advantage, as we have named it, if it 
occurs in the body of our flesh is properly called 
disease, in the annual seasons and the years pesti- 
lence, and in cities and governments injustice, 
which is only the same thing under another name. 
Such necessarily would be the argument of one 
who says that the gods are ever ready to pardon 
unjust men and doers of injustice, if they will 
share with the gods their spoils; as if wolves were 
to share a little of their ravages with the dogs, and 
the dogs, being tamed by such gifts, should per- 
mit the herds to be ravaged. Now would not a 
man, whoever he may be, make himself simply 
ridiculous by likening the gods to any of these 
guards—to pilots, for instance, who should be 
beguiled by libations and the mere vapour of 
wine to make shipwreck of their vessels and sea- 
men? or to drivers ranged in race who should be 
persuaded by a gift to betray the victory to an- 
other team? or to such generals, or physicians, or 
farmers? or to herdsmen or to dogs who should 
be charmed by wolves? Nay, of all guards the 
gods together are the greatest, and their trust is 


907 


106 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


over our greatest things. And shall we say that 
the guardians of what is fairest, themselves dis- 
tinguished for virtue in their trust, are baser than 
dogs or the common run of mankind who yet 
would never betray justice for the impious bribes 
of the unjust? No. The very mention of it is 
intolerable, and of all the workers of impiety, of 
all impious men, he who clings to this belief would 
be judged rightly the worst and most impious. 
And so we may say we have sufficiently demon- 
strated the three theses proposed by us: that the 
gods exist, that they are heedful, that they are 
implacable to the appeals of injustice. 

It may be that the zeal of contention with evil 
men has led me to speak with undue vehemence. 
If I for my part have appeared contentious, it 
was that such men might not prevail in the dis- 
cussion and so suppose they had authority to act 
as seemed to them good, in accordance with what- 
ever views of the gods they might entertain. 
Hence, I say, my zeal to speak trenchantly. And 
if I have accomplished anything at all by way of 
persuading these men to look on themselves with 
disfavour and to embrace a different course of 
life, I shall be well content with our preamble 
to the laws on the subject of impiety. 


CHAPTER V 


THEOLOGY : THE BEING OF GOD 


The central theme of The Republic, that which 
gives this dialogue its leading place in Plato’s 
works, is summed up in the phrase, the philoso- 
phy of the soul: “‘Thither we must look,” says 
Socrates, “to the philosophy of it.” ‘To pursue 
philosophy, to love wisdom, is to seek to know 
one’s soul, especially “to discern its true nature, 
whether it be uniform or multiform.” The whole 
trend of the dialogue had been to show that 
practically the soul is dual, having in it that 
which rides above the distractions and passions 
of this earthly existence, but having also within 
it that which draws it down from its self-pos- 
session by desires and appetites, pleasures and 
pains, in some way associated with the flesh. 
All experience points to this dualism of our 
being, yet withal, though we are unremitting- 
ly conscious of this divergent pull, we think 
_that in some mysterious manner the truth of 

the soul, our higher self as we may regard it, 

is that diviner member which endeavours to 

shake itself free of those distracting impulses, 
107 


61lE 


108 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


as if they were earthly accretions clinging to it 
and deforming its beauty. We do unrighteous- 
ness, yet we know that righteousness is the native 
element of the soul, its true property, of which 
somehow it has been deprived and for which it 
longs as for its own.’ And this knowledge is con- 
firmed by, rather is coincident with, a sense of 
self-justification independent of the world’s 
judgment and rewards, which marks the progress 
of the soul in righteousness and, as it were, back 
to itself. So it is that knowledge of the soul, the 
knowing one’s self which was the command of 
Apollo to all men of Greece, starts from and ter- 
minates in the perception of justice as a thing de- 
sirable in itself, and the profoundest philosophy, 
after its manifold searching and questioning, 
finds its goal at last in the simple axiom that is 
on the lips of all mankind though so little under- 
stood: virtue is its own reward, be good and you 
will be happy. 

We have seen further that, in order to bring 
out this philosophical truth in its naked strength, 
Plato was content for the time to leave a cleft 
between the moral sense of justice in the soul and 
the seeming disregard of morality and justice 
in the physical conduct of the world. But at the 
end of the tenth book, after the passage on the 
philosophy of the soul, which is a summary and 


1 Lysis 222p: To dyabov kal To oixeiov ay rairov Popev eivat. 


THE BEING OF GOD 109 


consummation of all that preceded, he suddenly 
declares that besides the inner witness there is 
yet another confirmation of the value of justice, 
viz. the fate of the soul in its immortal progress 
after death under the righteous judicature of the 
gods. A larger view of life, he would say, will 
reconcile the seeming disparities of destiny, and 
will show that there is a divine government of 
justice in the world as well as a human law of 
justice in the soul. This is no withdrawal from 
Plato’s former position and contains no latent 
contradiction, as some critics would have it; his 
meaning is not for a moment that what he has to 
add will be a repudiation of his philosophical 
conclusion, but that theology and mythology are 
complementary to his philosophy, the three form- 
ing together the complete life of religion. ‘The 
clear simple truth, that which we learned from 
immediate experience and intuition, has been 
given to us by philosophy; this we can possess 
without theology and without mythology, but, 
having this, we have laid the foundation for the 
superstructure of religion. In a way the super- 
structure may even be greater and fairer than 
the foundation; and Plato can say that the first 
honour is due to the gods and only the second 
honour to the soul,—to speak otherwise, having 
granted the existence of the gods, would be im- 
pious and insolent. Nevertheless, as we shall 


Laws 726 


110 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


see, the strongest evidence for the existence of the 
gods is derived from the soul’s own conscious- 
ness of itself, and in logical order as in security 
of conviction, philosophy takes the premier place 
in the religion of Plato. 

The concluding section of The Republic is 
thrown into the form of myth, and its considera- 
tion belongs to another place. Here we have to 
deal with the theological treatise inserted in the 
Laws, a translation of which was given in the 
preceding chapter. It opens with a solemn state- 
ment of the importance of accepting just those 
three propositions which were rejected hypo- 
thetically in the philosophical argument of The 
Republic, viz. the existence of the gods, their 
providential care of humanity, and their inex- 
orable justice. These are the three theses to be 
established. The first belongs to theology pure 
and simple, the second stands midway between 
theology and mythology, and the third turns back 
to theology with a new confirmation. 

For the first thesis, the existence of God or of 
the gods, Plato has three arguments: from de- 
sign, as we should say; from intuition, or the 
universality of belief, and from the nature of the 
soul. Of these three the last is no more than a 
development of the conclusion reached in the phi- 
losophical part of The Republic, and it is on this 
that he really rests his case. 


THE BEING OF GOD 111 


As St. Paul declared that God has not left 
Himself without a witness in the hearts of men, 
“for the invisible things of Him from the crea- 
tion of the world are clearly seen, being under- 
stood by the things that are made, even His eter- 
nal power and Godhead,” so Plato, in his argu- 
ment from design, points to the visible order of 
the heavens, the stars and the universe, as an elo- 
quent witness to the existence of a creator. Like 
Paul, or the Pauline writer to the Ephesians, he 
saw in all that outspread beauty “the manifold 
wisdom of God,” and was not “ashamed” to con- 
fess his belief. These variegated patterns Republic 529 
wrought out in the circle of the sky are but to- 
kens, he says, of a spiritual world. Such is the 
testimony from without, speaking in a language 
clear and convincing, he thought, to those who 
had eyes to see and ears to hear. And to this 
argument corresponds the witness of intuition, 
that all unsophisticated men, Greeks and bar- 
barians, do believe in the existence of the gods. 
Modesty alone, not to mention a proper scep- 
ticism towards our individual powers of reason- 
ing, ought to make us slow to accept our doubts 
against the common-sense of the world. Yet he 
knows that there are writings abroad which seek 
to argue away this instinctive faith by explain- 
ing the sun and moon and stars as mere masses 


2 Romans i, 20. 


112 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


of matter moving with no spiritual force to guide 
them, and by ridiculing as old wives’ tales the 
beliefs taught at a mother’s knee and expressed 
in the acts of public worship. And these books 
have an especial attraction for the knowing young 
men of Athens. It is hard not to be indignant 
with these wise moderns, these striplings, for the 
most part, who make the assurance of youth a 
substitute for reflection. He would like to say 
of such men what Paul actually said of the same 
class in his day: “Professing themselves to be 
wise, they became fools.”* But vituperation is 
not persuasion, and so he sets himself to reason 
with them, gently; suppressing, if possible, his 
feeling of indignation. 

He proceeds then to his third and, as he thinks, 
most cogent argument, based on the conception 
of soul as that which alone possesses the faculty 
of moving itself and of imparting motion to oth- 
ers, whereas body, or matter, has only the faculty 
of transmitting motion. In the natural order 
of logic, that which originates motion, In a 
world where all things are visibly moving, is 
antecedent to that which is moved. “Thus soul 
draws and leads all things in heaven and on 
earth and in the sea by its own motions, which 
we call willing, viewing, attending, considering, 
opining rightly and wrongly, itself rejoicing or 


3 Romans i, 22. 


THE BEING OF GOD 113 


grieving, courageous or fearful, hating or lov- 
ing.” It will follow further that the revolution 
of the heavens, which displays such manifest 
beauty and regularity, must be the work of a 
heedful and order-loving soul. The sun and 
moon and stars have their course not by chance 
but by the direction of guiding powers which are 
consciously good, and over all the universe pre- 
sides that great spirit which is no other than God. 

Such in brief is Plato’s main proof of the be- 
ing of a deity, proffered by him as a substitute 
for, or confirmation of, the common arguments 
from design and the universality of belief. In- 
evitably it raises two questions: first as to the 
validity of the logic, secondly, granted the valid- 
ity, as to the meaning to us of such a God as it 
establishes. 

Now up to a certain point the logic of the 
Athenian, who speaks for Plato, is convincing 
and would meet today with few if any objectors. 
No one is likely to dispute with him if he gives the 
name “soul” to the cause, or principle, of motion 
in the world, and the name “body,” or “matter,” 
to that which transmits motion, provided always 
he does not presume on the popular meaning 
attached to the word soul. I take it that most 
biologists of today will go a step further with 
him and will accede to the definition of conscious- 
ness as a faculty of self-motion. For such a 


114 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


statement I have at least the authority of a piece 
of ephemeral literature* which would seem to be 
fairly representative of the modern point of view. 
The writer takes for his text a sentence from Bal- 
zac: “If God is eternal be sure that he moves 
perpetually—perhaps God is movement”; and 
from this text he proceeds to the argument 
(which is not precisely Balzac’s as indeed Bal- 
zac’s intention is not quite Plato’s) that “life can 
exist without consciousness, but not conscious- 
ness, so far as we are aware, without life.’ The 
data of biology, he thinks, show that animal life 
begins with the advent of self-determined motion, 
and consciousness would appear to be a further 
development of this same faculty. “It is at 
least,” he says, “strictly in accordance with the 
hypothesis of consciousness deriving from move- 
ment that in human beings movement precedes 
consciousness by some months, and conscious- 
ness usually ceases some time before physical 
death.” That is to say the man of science to- 
day will probably stand with Plato in rejecting 
the crasser form of materialism and mechanism, 
which prevailed among the Darwinians of the 
mid-nineteenth century as it did among the know- 
ing youth of Plato’s Athens. He will admit the 
existence of self-determined motion in the world, 


4 The Heredity of the Soul, by A. Wyatt Tilby, in the Edinburgh 
Review for January 1919. 


THE BEING OF GOD 115 


and having made this admission, he must, if he 
be reasonable, accept the introduction into his 
scheme of things of a force indeterminable and 
spontaneous and extra-scientific. He will agree, 
again that is if he be reasonable, that conscious- 
ness is connected with this self-determined mo- 
tion, and so will grant to the human soul a par- 
tial escape at least from the nexus of mechanical 
cause and effect which enchains matter as the re- 
ceiver and transmitter only of motion. So far 
the man of science may go, perhaps is likely to 
go; but, granting so much, he may consistently 
draw back from the conclusion which Plato had 
in view. Consciousness, that is to say, all that 
gave any significance to soul as Plato thought of 
it, may be merely a derivation from, and secon- 
dary quality of, self-motion; and there is no proof 
that it is co-extensive with such motion, going 
back to the self-moving power, whatever that 
may be, which is the origin of all motion—noth- 
ing, from these admissions, to force the inference 
that soul, in this sense, as including reason and 
the aesthetic and moral judgments, is antecedent 
to such attributes of motion as are indicated by 
heavy and light, swift and slow, etc., much less 
the inference that God, as synonymous with such 
a soul, is the author and governor of the world 
as we know it. 

No, it cannot be said that Plato’s attempt to 


30A 


116 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


prove the existence of God by logical demon- 
stration from the nature of motion is rigidly con- 
vineing; though I think it fair to add that this 
demonstration, rightly understood, is less uncon- 
vineing than the ontological syllogism of Anselm 
and Spinoza and others of later date. And I 
suspect that Plato himself was aware of the final 
inadequacy of pure reason here, as in the whole 
metaphysical field. Otherwise why should he 
have based the great argument of The Republic, 
where he was looking for certainty, on a hypo- 
thetical atheism? You cannot conceive his under- 
taking, in like manner, to argue for the being of 
God from a hypothetical rejection of the soul’s 
existence and of its irrefragable consciousness of 
the value of righteousness. In other words his 
theology is really an ethical sequel to that spir- 
itual affirmation which he took from the lips of 
Socrates: It is better to do justice, better, if 
needs be, to suffer all injustice, than to do injus- 
tice; and this I know as I know the being of my 
own soul, though all else be shrouded in dark- 
ness and mystery. Granted this, as it must be 
granted, then Plato would say, indeed he has said 
in the Philebus, that as it is absurd to see in 
our material body anything more than a minute 
fragment of the body of the universe, so it is fatu- 
ous to suppose that our human soul, with its sense 
of justice and injustice, its foresight and after- 


THE BEING OF GOD 117 


thought, exists alone, with nothing corresponding 
to it in the world at large. And so, granted the 
existence of a cosmic soul, the argument from 
priority will follow, but still rather as an argu- 
mentum ad hominem, an appeal to interest, than 
as a metaphysical demonstration. He whose at- 
tention is set on the things of the soul will by the 
natural gravity of interest think of the soul as 
prior in power and worth to the body, whether 
in himself or in the universe.’ It will be impos- 
sible for him to fall in with the theories, be it of 
the ancient Democriteans or of the modern evo- 
lutionists, which regard a purely mechanical self- 
motion as first in the order of things and the 
conscious self-motion of the soul as a develop- 
ment out of blind mechanism at some point of 
time. That will seem to him the last absurdity. 
Nothing will be able to shake him out of his be- 
lief that there has been a self-conscious, self-mov- 
ing soul in the world from the beginning; in sim- 
pler language, that God is. If he has looked 
deeply and honestly into the matter, he will not 
contend that this belief is quite of the same kind 
as the knowledge of his own soul, and he will 
admit that the object of his belief is seen more or 
less vaguely through the haze of distance. But 

° Timaeus 46p: Tov d€ vod Kal émotypys epacriy dvdyKn Tas 


THS tudpovos Picews aitias rpwtas peradiwxKery, Soa S& ix’ GAwv 
‘ , 7 , 
pay Kwovpevey, érepa S€ &€ dvdyKns kwvovvtwy yiyvovrat, Sevrépas. 


118 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


he will hold that his belief is at the least more 
reasonable than the dogmatic negation of the 
atheist and more tenable than the sceptical sus- 
pense of the agnostic. In a metaphor dear to 
Plato and all the Platonists, he would liken the 
central truth of philosophy to the sun in the 
heavens, which throws out its light in circles ever 
widening and ever lessening in radiance with their 
distance from the source. So, he would say, the 
truths of theology are not the sun of our spiritual 
life, but though, like the greater planets, they 
shine only with reflected splendour, yet are they 
luminous still through the darkness of our night 
with unwavering beauty and majesty.° 

As for the value of such a belief, that will de- 
pend mainly on the character of its object. What 
and who is the God of the Platonic religion? 
The “philosophy of the soul” taught us that there 
is something within us set apart from the sway of 
passion, unchanged amid all that changes, our 
truer Self; and by analogy God, who is conceived 
in the likeness of the soul, ought also to be im- 
mutable, incapable of falsehood, without blemish 
of evil. And these are the qualities actually at- 
tributed to him in the outlines of theology 
sketched in the second book of The Republic.’ 
God is, in his character, forever immutable; 

6 See Appendix B. 

7379: Oi rizou mept Geodoyias. 


THE BEING OF GOD 119 


there is no power outside of him strong enough 
to alter his being, nor has he within himself 
any defect which calls for reparation. No ene- 
my exists who should frighten him to take 
refuge in deception; no one is dear to him who 
should need to be beguiled by false appearances. 
Rather, he is perfectly simple and true in 
thought and deed; and the signs and visions that 
mislead men in their waking and sleeping are not 
from him. He is good, and desires the harm of 
no one; beneficent, and does no evil nor is the 
cause of any evil; all that is good proceeds from 
him, but for the evil things in the world and in 
the heart of man he is not responsible. The 
gods—or God in the collective sense—are wise 
also, as they are good; they see and hear all things 
that fall within the range of perception, and all 
things are possible to them within the power of 
mortals or immortals. These are the attributes 
of Plato’s deity; of omniscience, omnipotence, 
ubiquity, and other metaphysical abstractions 
Plato has no word, or, if he seems anywhere to 
suggest them, they are repudiated by the whole 
tenor of his theology and mythology. 

In connection with this avoidance of meta- 
physical terms, it is important to utter a warn- 
ing against two kindred and persistent errors in 
the interpretation of Plato’s theology: the iden- 
tification of God with Ideas and the denial to 


Laws 901p 


120 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


God of personality. The deity is morally im- 
mutable but not immutability, perfectly true and 
good but not truth itself or goodness itself. A1- 


Republic 5098 most, in one place, Plato absorbs God into the 


Timaeus 28c 


Idea of goodness, but not quite, and in the 
Timaeus he is careful to speak of the creator as 
good, never as goodness. To have fallen into 
such an identification would have been to confuse 
the boundaries of philosophy and theology with 
results disastrous to his whole system of religion; 
it was left for the Neoplatonists and for over- 
zealous Christian theologians to forget these dis- 
tinctions. Of this error we shall have more to 
say later; it is sufficient here to assert emphatical- 
ly that for Plato God was not a philosophical 
entity, much less a metaphysical abstraction, but 
truly the maker and father of the world. 

The denial of personality to Plato’s God, so 
far as I can understand the case, rests on two 
grounds: one general, being a supposition that 
the very conception of personality was lacking 
to the Greeks, the other particular to the Platonic 
philosophy. As for the first of these grounds, 
whatever plausibility it possesses would seem to 
be derived from the absence in Greek of any term 
corresponding precisely with our word “person.” 
Because the Greek tongue wants the term, there- 
fore, it is argued, the Greek mind lacked the con- 
ception. But this, I maintain, is a linguistic fal- 


THE BEING OF GOD 121 


lacy. It may be conceded that such a defect of 
terminology would make itself felt in various 
ways, more especially in the field of technical lit- 
erature;® but to say that the sense itself of per- 
sonality was lacking to the minds that created 
the Homeric poems, the Attic tragedy, and the 
Platonic Dialogues is an absurdity on the face 
of it. Is Odysseus no person, or Antigone, or the 
Socrates of the Apology and the Phaedo? And 
I am afraid that the extension of this linguistic 
fallacy into the subject matter of religion is only 
one phase of a wide-spread and rather ugly form 
of conceit. You might suppose, from the solem- 
nity with which the word “personality” is pro- 
nounced by a certain school of modern theolo- 
gians and philosophers of a theological cast, that 
some new panacea had been discovered, capable 
of curing every spiritual ailment of the soul. In 
the volume of Mansfield College Essays, for in- 
stance, one of the contributors, Mr. A. N. Row- 
land, exclaims pontifically that “personality is 
the one mystery that eludes the grasp of science,” 
and so it is; but does it follow that the utterance 
of the mystic formula is going to solve the dif- 
ficulties of religious faith which have been troub- 


8 The case is quite similar to the deficiency in respect to “re- 
ligion.” Greek had special words for the various aspects of “per- 
sonality” (psyché, prosépon, hypostasis), but no clearly defined 
term for the general conception. 


122 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ling an ignorant world for some thousands of 
years? Shall we forget that long ago the Chris- 
tian Church almost wrecked itself in the Nes- 
torian and Kutychian controversy over the hypo- 
stasis and prosdpon, which is about the same as 
to say the “personality,” of Jesus? 

The second ground of denial runs parallel with 
the rejection of personal immortality as incom- 
patible with Plato’s Idealism.’ It is entirely of 
a piece with that Hegelian interpretation of the 
Dialogues in the spirit of Plotinus, and is, I do 
not hesitate to say, the most mischievous error 
in the history of philosophy. Surely the den- 
izens of Olympus were human and personal be- 
yond the gods of any other of the great religions 
known to us. If Zeus and Hera were not per- 
sonalities, I do not see what meaning is to be at- 
tached to the word, and neither Socrates nor 
Plato ever rejected these gods of the people, 
though they strove to purify and supplement the 
common conception of them. And the high God 


9 An interesting and popular statement of the metaphysical 
position, with references to Zeller and others, may be found in 
John Oakesmith’s Religion of Plutarch, p. 205. Mr. Oakesmith 
himself thinks that Plutarch has advanced in philosophy by his 
belief in a personal God, whereas “the element of personality is 
totally absent” from Plato’s conception. I should say rather 
that Plutarch’s strength lay in holding fast to a true Platonism, 
in this respect at least, against the invasion of an Aristotelian 
metaphysic which was about to culminate in Neoplatonism. 


THE BEING OF GOD 123 


of philosophy, whom Plato would impose on the 
polytheistic mythology, was still human and per- 
sonal. “The two essential constituents of human 
personality,” says Mr. Rowland in the essay al- 
ready quoted, “are self-consciousness and self- 
determination.” But these were just the quali- 
ties from which Plato in the theological tract of 
the Laws drew his argument for the priority of 
soul to matter and for the consequent existence of 
God. Soul, psyché, is that in man which is self- 
conscious and self-determined”—it is in fact in 
one of its senses almost an equivalent for our 
word personality—and God is to the universe 
what the soul is to man, and something more. 
What else can be made of the argument from a 
self-motion which is distinguished from a mechan- 
ically transmitted motion by the attributes of 
thought and feeling, the sense of beauty and ug- 
liness, right and wrong? 

The God whom Socrates served and Plato 
preached was not an empty generalization of 
metaphysics and was closer to the human heart 
than the nominis wmbra which the Deists, as chil- 
dren of the ancient Porch, pretended to adore as 

10 So in the Timaeus 778 Plato combines self-motion and self- 
consciousness in his distinction between plants and men: “The 
plant was not endowed by nature with the faculty of observing 
its own being and reflecting thereon; hence it lives and is in a 


way a living creature, but is stationary and rooted in its place, 
because it lacks the power of self-motion.” 


124 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


a semi-personification of scientific law. Plato 
was still a poet of the race of Homer and Pindar 
and Aeschylus, though the first of philosophers. 
But it would be shirking the truth to ignore the 
fact that the supreme Deity of Platonism, while 
far removed from the First Cause of metaphysics 
and science, is left somewhat vague by the denu- 
dation of the warmer traits of the mythological 
imagination. I would preserve, if possible, a just 
measure in my apology. Plato, it must be ad- 
mitted, is as cautious in what he does not say of 
God as he is confident in what he does say, and he 
repeatedly gives warning against the assumption 
of knowing more than we actually know. “It 
is hard,” he declares, ‘‘to discover the maker and 
father of the universe, and impossible, when dis- 
covered, to express him to all men.” Yet withal 
he will not utterly suppress curiosity in these 
high matters, or acquiesce in silence; he will even 
take a stand in opposition to the sham modesty 
which would forbid a man “to search into or be 
over curious about the Greatest God and the 
universe as a whole.” The point to be made 


11 These two passages, Timaeus 28c and Laws 821a, are among 
the most influential in Plato’s works, and innumerable echoes of 
them will be found in the Hellenistic writers. The passage of the 
Timaeus is grasped at by Christian apologists to show the in- 
feriority of pagan speculation to revealed theology. The passage 
of the Laws was taken by Cicero (De Nat. Deor. i, 12) without 
its context and so quite misunderstood. By the Christians it was 


THE BEING OF GOD 125 


from these two memorable passages is simply the 
reverence of Plato always in his approach to this 
theme—a reverence which might be described as 
a feeling compounded of the Socratic affirmation 
and the Socratic scepticism. The spirit in which 
he conducted his inquiry may be learned from 
the three minor theological dialogues—the 
Euthyphro, if that marvellous little work can be 
called minor, the Second Alcibiades, and part of 
the Lysis. 

Now it may be granted at once that this reti- 
cence before the divine mystery, this confessed 
ignorance of God’s nature as revealed to the 
Jew by prophecy and to the Christian by the in- 
carnation, leaves the Platonic Deity a pale con- 
ception by the side of Jehovah or of the divinely 
compassionate Father, a conception lacking com- 
paratively in driving force and wanting in some 
of the deeper human consolations, although, in 
compensation, it is free also of the sharper in- 
centives to fanaticism which have maddened so 
many religious communities. We may grant so 


commonly quoted, or echoed, as a command against over-curiosity. 
So, e.g., Chrysostom (In Rom, 641p) admonishes those who would 
insist on the logical difficulties of election and reprobation: “Be 
not over-curious about God.” See also In Mat. 775z. The Christian 
preacher, I think, was not far from the real meaning of Plato, 
as Hobbes certainly was very far when, in his Letter About Lib- 
erty and Necessity, he said: “We ought not to dispute of God’s 
Nature, he is no fit subject for our Philosophy.” 


126 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


much; but still for all that is necessary to the 
religious life of a man, for the large things of the 
spirit, the theology of Plato is sufficient. Thus 
much we know—and it is the gist of the whole 
matter—that the souls of men are not set adrift 
in a soulless world, either to fortify themselves 
in the harsh pride of indifference or to sink down 
in abject terror at the thought of their loneliness. 
However humbly Plato may have shrunk from 
defining the maker and father of the universe, 
his God is not the Unknowable of the dogmatiz- 
ing agnostic. He who reads Plato’s theological 
discourse may recall Spencer’s desolating con- 
fession at the end of his life: 


“There is one aspect of the Great Enigma to 
which little attention seems given, but which has 
of late years more frequently impressed me. I 
refer not to the problems which all concrete ex- 
istence, from suns down to microbes, present, but 
to those presented by the universal form under 
which these exist—the phenomena of Space... . 

“And then comes the thought of this universal 
matrix itself, anteceding alike creation and evolu- 
tion, whichever be assumed, and infinitely trans- 
cending both, alike in extent and duration; since 
both, if conceived at all, must be conceived as hav- 
ing had beginnings, while Space had no begin- 
ning. The thought of this blank form of exist- 
ence which, explored in all directions as far as 


THE BEING OF GOD 127 


imagination can reach, has, beyond that, an un- 
explored region compared with which the part 
which imagination has traversed is but infinitesi- 
mal—the thought of a Space compared with 
which our immeasurable sidereal system dwindles 
to a point, is a thought too overwhelming to be 
dwelt upon. Of late years the consciousness that 
without origin or cause infinite Space has ever 
existed and must ever exist, produces in me a 
feeling from which I shrink.” 

Say what one will, these blank misgivings are 
the inevitable outcome of a practical atheism that 
has not numbed the imagination into sleep; they 
follow inexorably, as it were the Erinyes of phi- 
losophy, any conception of the world as a huge 
unconscious mechanism, at the heart of which 
sits blind Chance or blind Law. We may believe 
of Lucretius, the supremely great spokesman of 
all those against whom Plato was contending in 
his theology, greater than any who succeeded 
him, 

“Who dropped his plummet down the broad 
Deep universe, and said ‘No God,’ 


13 


Finding no bottom”— 


we may believe of him that he was “nobler than 
his mood,” but if we do so it is because his infinite 
sadness teaches a truth he himself could not learn. 


12 Ultimate Questions 301-304.—See Shelburne Essays XI, 146. 
13 Mrs. Browning, 4 Vision of Poets. 


Laws 672aD 


128 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


From all such blank misgivings the Platonist is 
set free. So certain is he of a supernatural power 
ruling the world and displaying itself in the 
larger spectacles of nature, that he is able to draw 
from these a lesson for the ordering of his own 
soul. He will go further than this, and will be- 
lieve that the sun and moon and the other lumi- 
naries above us are not merely signs of a central 
wisdom from which all order springs, but are 
themselves gods, or the visible chariots of gods. 

It was in fact not the least advantage of Plato’s 
untrammeled theology that it left room in the 
universe for a host of lesser deities, the two con- 
ceptions of monotheism and polytheism being not 
antagonistic or mutually exclusive, but rather dif- 
ferent aspects of one and the same truth. And 
so, besides those more philosophic gods who ride 
the spheres, Plato is not afraid to acknowledge 
the gods of the people, including the whole 
hierarchy that extends from Zeus upwards 
through Cronos to the vaguer personifications of 
Earth and Ocean and Sky, and down through 
the lessening generations. The good things of 
life are the gifts of the divine bounty, and our 
gratitude for the dance, let us say, may well be 
directed to Apollo and the Muses, and for the 
exhilaration of the vine we may praise Dionysus. 
In their pity for mankind the gods have bestowed 
these blessings, and shall we withhold our thanks- 


THE BEING OF GOD 129 


giving because we know not in what manner the 
invisible donors greet one another in the heavenly 
ways? Even the Di minorum gentiwm, each “lit- 
tle god of small things,”** who walked unseen 
with the plowman at his plow and watched the 
mother as she nursed her child, need not be ex- 
cluded from the philosopher’s pantheon. Of all 
these gods, great or humble, Plato will say that 
we have no certain or even probable proofs; but 
their names have come down to us from remote 
antiquity when perhaps mankind was more in- 
timate with its divine source, and why should we 
reject them? “All things are full of the gods”; 
this we know, and how can we speak better of 
them than as we have been taught by tradition ¢ 

But though Plato so far accepts the popular 
belief in a spirit of more or less sceptical ac- 
quiescence, he deals very differently with the cur- 
rent tales that attributed loose or immoral con- 
duct to the gods. Such stories he repudiates al- 
ways with the utmost indignation. Even the 
human passions of a more innocent character he 
is inclined to repudiate as incompatible with any 
form of the divine nature, and to one who has 

14From the fine epigram of Perses (Kapé tov év opixpois 
6Atyov Gedv), which Mr. Mackail translates: “Even me the little 
god of small things if thou call upon in due season thou shalt 
find; but ask not for great things; since whatsoever a god of 


the commons can give to a labouring man, of this I, Tycho, have 
control.” 


130 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


read the second book of The Republic it may 
seem that he has left to the happy immortals of 
the Homeric Olympus little more than Homer 
himself left to the shades of the underworld. Let 
us admit that there is some difficulty in accept- 
ing the Zeus and Apollo of tradition while strip- 
ping them of what really invested them, in the 
popular mind, with the substance of life. Yet 
Plato might say that inconsistency in such mat- 
ters is almost another word for humility; and he 
might add that traits were still left to the gods 
sufficient to present them to the imagination as 
living entities—Zeus with his thunderbolts and 
Apollo with his lyre—without degrading them 
by admixture of the baser instincts of men. The 
untutored mind may have true glimpses of the 
coming and going of the immortals, though it 
wrap the truth about with its own coarser fan- 
cies. 

But the manifestations of the divine nature did 
not end with the greater gods of the poets, or with 
those lesser beings who haunted the springs and 
glens and other fair spots of the earth or stood 
by men in their toils and pleasures. Still below 
these was the strange race of daemons, those mys- 
terious forces from the invisible world to whom 
no specific names were given and who were 
scarcely personified, if at all. By the very vague- 
ness of their nature these would appeal to the 


THE BEING OF GOD 131 


philosophic mind which was reaching out for some 
point of contact between a new conception of the 
divine and the popular mythology. So, it will 
be remembered, a reverence for the daemon, or the 
daemonic power, was the basis of the charge 
brought against Socrates as an introducer of new 
gods; this reverence was indeed, in the form 
given to it by him, the beginning of a new re- 
ligion, which was taken up by Plato and so passed 
on to the world.” The same belief will be found 
in the philosophers of the Hellenistic age who 
drew on Socrates and Plato for their faith; it 
plays no insignificant role among the Christians,”° 
whose conception of the Logos was deeply af- 
fected by remembrance of the Platonic dai- 
monion, though they were wont to conceal their 
indebtedness by converting the daemons into 
devils. 

Plutarch more especially deals with the sub- 
ject in his discussion of The Daemon of Socrates 
and in his two essays on the oracles. As for his 
explanation of the Socratic daemon he would 
have us believe that it goes back to a statement 

15It might even be said that “the daemonic” (ro Sarponov) 
is the nearest equivalent in the Greek language for our word “re- 
ligion.” So Hug in his excellent note to the Symposium 202k: 
“Den Damonen wird in diesen Satzen das ganze Gebiet der Re- 
ligion zugewiesen, wofiir den Griechen ein zusammenfassender 


Begriff fehlt.” 
16 Justin Martyr, Apologia II, x. 


132 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


of one of the two Theban Pythagoreans who 
were present with Socrates on the day of his 
death. Whether this is a bit of dramatic fiction 
or not, Plutarch has given expression to the view 
that was current in his age and that became al- 
most the central dogma of Platonism for later 
times—such at least it was for the so-called Cam- 
bridge Platonists of the seventeenth century. 
The story is that Simias once asked Socrates 
about the daemon, and, receiving no answer, had 
not repeated his question. But he had often 
heard Socrates declare those to be vain pretend- 
ers who said they had seen a divine apparition, 
whereas he would gladly hearken to those who 
thought they had heard a voice. Hence the con- 
jecture that this daemon of Socrates was not an 
apparition, but rather the perception of a voice 
or an apprehension of speech conveyed to him in 
some unaccountable manner, as in a dream there 
is no real voice yet we have fancies and appre- 
hensions that make us imagine we hear some one 
speak. Such a perception is common in dreams, 
because the body whilst we sleep is quiet and un- 
perturbed; but Socrates’ soul, being pure and 
free from passion, and mixing itself with the body 
no more than necessity required, was easy to be 
moved and apt to take an impression from any 
light influence; and that which influenced it was 
not a sound, but what one might call the un- 


THE BEING OF GOD 133 


spoken word (logon aneu phdnés) of a daemon 
impressed immediately on the mind. We, it is 
true, as it were groping in the dark, find out one 
another’s conceptions by the voice; but the con- 
ceptions of the daemons carry a light with them, 
and shine for those who are able to perceive, so 
that there is no need of words such as we use as 
signs to one another, seeing thereby only the 
images of the conceptions. Most men believe 
that daemons communicate illuminations to us 
in sleep, but think it strange that they should 
communicate the like to us whilst we are awake 
and have our senses and reason vigorous; as wise 
a fancy as it is to imagine that a musician can 
use his harp when the strings are slack, but can- 
not play when they are screwed up and in tune. 
For such men do not consider that the effect is 
hindered by the unquietness and incapacity of 
their minds; from which inconvenience Socrates 
was free, as the oracle assured his father whilst 
he was a boy.” 

Whatever may have been the ultimate source 
of this explanation of the Socratic guide, it was 
on such a theory that Plutarch built up his own 
religious creed, as expounded in the two essays on 

17 De Genio Socratis 20, Abridged and adapted from the trans- 
lation revised by W. W. Goodwin. For a hint of the same ex- 


planation given by a younger contemporary of Socrates, see the 
Memorabilia of Xenophon, IV, iii. 


134 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


the oracles. Deity, he says, appears to us in this 
world of material phenomena as the race of dae- 
mons, through whom men communicate with the 
gods and are made one with them. Through 
the daemons come oracles and all intimations of 
things in the womb of nature; and if the oracular 
voices are obscure and broken and fallible, it is 
because the daemon himself belongs to a low 
order of the hierarchy and furthermore is obliged 
to communicate with us by means of the resist- 
ing medium of a human soul and material or- 
gans."° From the same daemonic otherworld 
comes the voice, or shadow of a voice, that brings 
warnings to the individual soul, heard vaguely 
at times by all men but comprehended only by 


18 De Defectu Oraculorum 10, et passim. The same thought is 
developed even more precisely by another Platonist, Maximus 
Tyrius, in the ninth and eleventh of his Discourses. The latter of 
these closes with a striking account of the celestial hierarchy: 
“Consider the great King himself, unmoving, like Law, to those 
that obey passing on the security that exists in himself. Consider 
also those that share in his government; many visible gods, many 
invisible, some clustering about his threshold as courtly ushers 
and princes of the blood, familiar at his table and hearth; others 
the servants of these, and others still inferior. You behold the 
succession and ranks of authority descending from God to earth.” 

19 De Pythiae Oraculis 21. Plutarch’s argument is amusingly 
like that of our modern spiritualists who apologize for the stam- 
mering utterance and the vacuity of the supposed communica- 
tions from the dead. But I think Plutarch would have found the 
reports of our séances more disturbing to his faith in the unseen 
world than he found the priestly records of Delphi and the other 
oracular sites of Greece. 


THE BEING OF GOD 135 


those who have attuned their body until it has 
become as it were a sounding board for these 
celestial echoes. 

This Plutarchian sense of the daemonic, or of 
the undefined spirit as we might say, everywhere 
interpenetrating the visible world, lay, I think, 
in the background also of Plato’s theology. We 
are plants not of an earthly but of a heavenly 
growth; the soul is a creature of the gods and 
had elsewhere its rising, and some day, if we 
practise philosophy in the love of true knowledge 
and true virtue, the soul shall be lifted up again 
as in a winged chariot to be with the gods and 
to know them as they are, and move with them 
in their procession behind the great God of all, 
to a place whence they and we shall contemplate 
with pure joy the supernal beauty which is not 
of this world. But now it is not so. Now the 
soul is held down with earthly weights, and its 
desires are not clean, and before its eyes are the 
veils of the flesh. What the gods behold in un- 
clouded splendour, we see only in shadows and 
signs; and when they speak to us of their vision 
and of what our life should be, we hear their 
voices faintly and indistinctly as sounds borne to 
us from afar on the winds. Now our communion 
is not so much with the gods directly—though 
they too are really near at hand—as with the 
daemons, or the daemonic soul of the world. This 


Timaeus 90a 


Phaedrus 
246a ff. 


Symposium 
202E ff. 


136 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


it is that acts as interpreter, or ferryman, between 
gods and men, carrying our petitions and offer- 
ings to the gods and bringing to us their com- 
mands and answers, being, as it were, an inter- 


_ mediary which bridges the interval between the 


mortal and the immortal and binds the whole to- 
gether into one unbroken order. By the dae- 
monic provision we have the art of divination and 
are instructed in the ceremonies of religion, and 
through it we learn the charms and mystic rites 
that pacify the terror of our lonely state. He 
who has attained to wisdom in these matters is 
the daemonic man, whereas those who have ac- 
quired cunning in the other arts are only crafts- 
men of a vulgar sort. Many are the daemons 
and many their kinds, and one of them is the 
love that raises the desire of the soul from earthly 
to heavenly things. 

Plato’s theology is thus an extension of his 
“philosophy of the soul,” and the strength of his 
conviction might be summed up in a later say- 
ing: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they 
shall see God”—or rather, changing the accent, 
he would say: For they shall see with God. 


CHAPTER VI 


THEOLOGY: PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 


The background, so to speak, of Plato’s re- 
ligion is that sense of the daemonic lying every- 
where half-concealed and half-revealed behind the 
material phenomena of the world; but in the pre- 
amble to the Laws he is dealing more specifically 
with the theological problem of God as the su- 
preme personal force in the divine hierarchy. We 
have seen how he sought to establish the being 
of such a deity; the two remaining questions are 
the Providence of God and the inexorability of 
his justice. Now we know from The Republic 
that the moral qualities which can be attributed 
certainly to God are goodness and wisdom, truth 
and immutability, and we shall not go astray in 
looking to these attributes to find the rule of his 
activity as it is concerned with our own being: 
Providence will be the working of God’s goodness 
and wisdom, the inexorable rigour of the divine 
justice will be a corollary of his truth and im- 
mutability. 

God is good, Plato says in the Timaeus, and 
having no envy desired all things to be as like to 
himself as possible; this indeed is the sovereign 

137 


29E 


138 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


principle of creation and of the cosmos. And in 
the preamble to the Laws this same attribute of 
goodness is extended to his ceaseless care of that 
which has been created; there is no dullness or 
indifference in his good-will that he should neg- 
lect his handiwork and abandon its maintenance 
to the fumbling fingers of Chance or to the re- 
lentless hand of Fate. Plato’s argument for 
Providence is merely an extension of his diatribe 
against the followers of Democritus and Prota- 
goras, better known to us in their later develop- 
ment as Epicureans. These men, whether for 
prudential reasons or from conviction, were will- 
ing, if pressed, to admit the existence of the gods, 
but rendered such an admission meaningless for 
religion by setting the gods apart in some remote 
sphere entirely severed from actuality, while they 
regarded all the immediate operations of the 
world as the effects of chance or impersonal law. 
Practically their position was the same as that 
of the agnostics or evolutionists of today—or 
should we say of yesterday ’—who by relegating 
God to the Unknowable free themselves from 
any charge of dogmatic atheism yet are able to 
elaborate a mechanistic theory of the universe 
untrammeled by the interference of a known 
deity. They acknowledge a God, but by re- 
jecting Providence deprive the word of any 
human significance. Such philosophers might be 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 139 


called semi-atheists, and it is against these rather 
than the professed atheists that the strength of 
Plato’s reasoning is directed.’ 

Now it is easy to say, in a loose general fashion, 
that a God of goodness will not leave the work 
of his hands uncared for; but as soon as we try to 
realize this care in the form of a Providence ex- 
tending to all the daily occurrences of a man’s 
life, let us say, and of all men’s lives, three great 
obstacles start up, connected respectively with 
difficulties of the reason, of the imagination, and 
of our moral sense. 

As for the first difficulty, reason may ask why 
an omnipotent Creator should not have so con- 
trived his handiwork that it would, as it were, 
run its own course like a perfectly designed en- 
gine; why should it require his constant attention 
and, to speak irreverently, tinkering? Plato’s 
answer to such a question may be gathered from 
the Timaeus and elsewhere. God is not omnipo- 
tent, and indeed such a term belongs to those 


1 Professor Jebb, in his note on Oedipus Tyrannus 978, calls 
attention to the statement of Favorinus (Diogenes Laertius, Plat. 
§24 to the effect that Plato mparos év didocodia . ... dvopace 
. . . Geov mpdvoray. The note continues: “Bentley takes this to 
mean that Plato was the first to use zpovova of divine providence 
(not merely of human forethought). . . . [But] the Stoics, not 
Plato, first used zpovova, without further qualification, of a divine 
providence. . . . The meaning of Favorinus was that Plato first 
established in philosophy the conception of a divine providence, 
though popular language had known such a phrase before.” 


140 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


metaphysical abstractions which have no place in 
religion or in true philosophy. Nor is creation 
an act of evoking something out of nothing, an 
act complete and definitive in itself and depend- 
ing solely on the will of the Creator; it is rather 
the approximate and continuous subjection to law 
and order of a subsisting chaos which never suc- 
cumbs perfectly to restraint and never entirely 
yields up its own spasmodic impulse. Such is 
the phenomenal world whereinto the souls of 
men are born, each with his own little world of 
chaos within himself to regulate and subdue. 
Rationally considered, Providence is an integral 
part of the Platonic dualism, needing no such 
defense as is demanded to justify its inclusion 
in a theological or metaphysical monism. 

The real difficulty in the way of Providence 
is not raised, for the Platonist at least, by the 
reason, but first of all by the imagination. It is 
the very grandeur of the theory that militates 
against a practical faith, We picture God as 
sitting afar off in splendid isolation, uttering his 
decrees that run like thunder through the infinite 
ways of space; and to think of him at the same 
time as present in the streets of our cities and 
walking beside us as we go about our daily busi- 
ness, is an impiety, if not an impossibility. Our 

2It is a popular error to think of this difficulty as first raised 
by the Copernican astronomy, whereas in fact it was already acute 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 141 


spiritual vision is irredeemably spacial. It is tem- 
poral also, and we shrink back appalled at the 
idea of a mind that can embrace consciously at 
one and the same time so vast a complexity of 
ever-changing events. It was this diffidence of 
the imagination which led certain of the Stoics to 
say that “the gods care for great things, but 
neglect the little,” a saying which we have pre- 
served in our legal maxim, De minimis non curat 
lex.’ 

Of the same order is the doubt forced upon us 
by the sense of isolation that is a part of our per- 
sonal consciousness. Not in Plato’s day only but 
always our scepticism towards Providence has 
sprung in large measure from a kind of terror 
of vanity that invades the soul when we reflect 
on our unimportance in a society of beings each 
centred in its own destiny. Dr. Johnson, with 
his customary skill in lending gravity to the com- 
mon-places of experience, has laid his finger un- 
under the old system. It makes little difference to the imagina- 
tion, when the problem is rightly conceived, whether Providence 
is concerned with one world of men or with many worlds of 
animate beings. See Aubrey de Vere’s poem on Copernicus. 

3 Cicero, De Nat. Deor. ii, 167: Magna di curant, parva ne- 
glegunt. Euripides had said the same thing: Tov ayay yap amretat 
Geos, Ta puxpa & eis TUynV aveis éa. The thought becomes com- 
mon. See, e.g., the discussion in Epictetus I, xii, 1, and the fanci- 


ful, half Christian half pagan, use of the idea by Synesius, De 
Providentia I, 10 and 11. 


142 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


erringly on the emotion that at times must over- 
take all men: 


“The truth is that no man is much regarded 
by the rest of the world. He that considers how 
little he dwells upon the condition of others, will 
learn how little the attention of others is attracted 
by himself. While we see multitudes passing 
before us, of whom, perhaps, not one appears to 
deserve our notice or excite our sympathy, we 
should remember that we likewise are lost in the 
same throng, that the eye which happens to 
glance upon us is turned in a moment on him 
that follows us, and that the utmost which we 
can reasonably hope or fear is to fill a vacant 
hour with prattle and be forgotten.’”* 


It is not only our personal vanity that is hurt 
by such a reflection, but, it may be, our religion 
also. If the sum of life is to fill a vacant hour 
and be forgotten, where is the kindly hand of 
Providence? When, perceiving the indifference 
of our fellow men and shuddering perhaps at our 
own inability even to grasp the reality of so vast 
a horde of self-centred individuals, we sink back 
into the loneliness of our soul, then the spiritual 
imagination is paralysed and inevitably we extend 
this sense of neglect into whatever regions are 
open to the thought of consciousness. As we 
learn that personality among men means separa- 

4 Rambler 159. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 143 


tion, it becomes extremely difficult to realize in 
the mind such a divine person as is demanded by 
the idea of Providence. “What is man that thou 
art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou 
visitest him?” Plato’s reply to these difficulties 
is to point to the magnificence of the divine order 
that keeps the stars in their courses and forbids 
the sun to grow weary, its marvellous scope and 
unremitting diligence, and then to ask on what 
ground we believe that such a power would over- 
look or in any wise neglect the details of govern- 
ment. Would it be through ignorance? No, not 
through ignorance. Would it be from effeminate 
slackness? No, certainly not from that. Would 
it be because he knows that he has no reason to 
attend to such things? And again the answer 
must be no; for not even among men would a 
wise physician or husbandman or statesman be 
commendable on such a basis. “Neither let us 
suppose that God, the most wise, being willing 
and having the power to attend, heeds the great 
things, but neglects those little things which are 
the more easily heeded, like some feckless and 
lazy artificer who grows slack over his toil.” 
Plato’s argument, judged superficially by its 
terms, may sound merely quaint and antiquated 
in modern ears; but I suspect that, rightly un- 
derstood, it reaches far down into the heart of 
the matter. It is an appeal at once to the reason 


144 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


to clarify itself and to the imagination to lift 
itself to a truer vision of the nature of God, 
whose greatness is measured, not by a kind of iso- 
lated universality, but by his power of compre- 
hending endless details and of being present with 
each while still grasping the whole. And the ob- 
stacle raised by our moral sense Plato will meet 
in much the same way. The question itself is 
one that has troubled many minds, and has not 
grown old with time: how shall we reconcile faith 
in the watchful government of a just and mighty 
God with the apparent injustices of human des- 
tiny? “The fortunes of evil and unjust men,” 
Plato says, the spectacle of “wicked old men 
reaching their term of years and leaving their 
children’s children in the highest honours,” these 
are the things that drive a reflective mind to 
doubt the reality of Providence. So Job asked: 
“Wherefore do the wicked live, become old, yea, 
are mighty in power?” Ennius states the matter 
bluntly, in good Roman fashion: 


Ego deum genus esse semper dixi et dicam caelitum, 

Sed eos non curare opinor quid agat humanum genus; 

Nam si curent, bene bonis sit, male malis, quod nunc 
abest. 


Plutarch will compose one of his subtlest es- 
says, De Sera Numinis Vindicta, to explain 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 145 


away the paradox, and a whole literature of 
apology, following the model of the Chaeronean 
Platonist, will grow up among Christian theo- 
logians. But there is no need to multiply exam- 
ples; the question has arisen wherever and when- 
ever men begin to consider “the ways of God to 
man” in the light of their own sense of justice 
and moral right. Our business is with the theolo- 
gy of the Laws, which offers the first serious 
theodicy of the western world and, I hazard the 
statement, still the most satisfactory. 

Plato opens his argument with what he calls 
a kind of mythical charm for the incensed soul: 


“Let us persuade the young man, if words may 
avail, that all things have been ordered by God, 
who has the world in care, to the salvation and 
virtue of the whole, each member passively and 
actively contributing its part according to its 
ability. Over this multiform world rulers have 
been set to govern sectionally down to the small- 
est detail of what must be suffered and done, to 
the end that each section may be brought to its ap- 
pointed consummation. Of this system, O 
wretched man, thou art a single part, which looks 
to the whole and tends to that, though in itself 
of the least magnitude; yet it has not occurred to 
thee that in such a system every part of creation 
has its birth to the end that the life and being of 
the whole may enjoy happiness, not the whole for 
thee, but thou for it... . But thou art vexed, not 


146 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


understanding how that which happens to thee 
is best for the whole and for thee, so far as the 
common creation permits.” 


This is the famous paradox of the whole and 
the part which will play so important a réle in 
the philosophies of the Stoic, the Deist, the im- 
perfect Christian, and, one may add, the modern 
man of science; and if Plato had stopped here it 
would be hard to rescue him from the charge of 
that shallow optimism which virtually denies the 
existence of anything intrinsically wrong or 
odious in the world. We might, of course, as a 
corrective, point to the numerous passages in 
which Plato gives expression to his belief in the 
very insistent fact of evil, and indeed no one can 
read much in the Dialogues without feeling 
that their tendency is rather to over-emphasize 

cea yo¢than to minimize this reality: ‘For us,” he says, 
“evils abound far more than good.” But such 
a correction, taken alone, would still leave him 
open to the same accusation of fundamental in- 
consistency which was brought against the Stoics 
for teaching in their physics that whatever is is 
right, while in their ethics they bemoan the con- 
dition of human life as a state of misery and evil. 
Plato’s escape from this inconsistency is hinted at 
in the last clause of the passage quoted: “so far 
as the common creation permits.” Now, in them- 
selves, these words might be used by a Stoic, 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 147 


but with a different implication. The Stoic, as 
an avowed monist and determinist, for whom 
God is the cause of all things that are, would 
understand them to mean simply that men as 
mere fragments of the whole must have the in- 
completeness of fragments; he would not admit 
that this incompleteness of the separate parts im- 
ports any taint of evil or even of imperfection 
into the system as a whole. But, however Plato 
may seem, in this passage torn from its context, 
to be indulging in the same sort of logomachy, it 
must be remembered that he is not a monist and 
never for a moment holds that God is the deter- 
mining cause of all things. On the contrary, 
after his statement in The Republic of the super- 
abundance of evils in our life, he adds that ““God 
and no other must be held the cause of what good 
we enjoy, whereas for the evils other causes must 
be sought, and not God.” The same idea occurs 
elsewhere in the Dialogues, and in the Timaeus 
it is made the text for an elaborate fable of crea- 
tion. 

Plato’s theory, which combines the recognition 
of evil with a perception of the world’s harmo- 
nious structure and finds a place for Providence, 
would then be something like this. ‘There are 
sources of good and evil in the soul, and as soul 
permeates all and governs all, there must be both 
good and evil in the heavens as in all the other 


148 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


operations of the phenomenal world. He will 
even say that “the heavens are filled with powers 
of good many in number, and with contrary 
powers more numerous still than the good”; but 
he is speaking here of the heavens as part of the 
scene of human life and of the “deathless battle” 
in which mankind is engaged. When he forgets 
our mortal stress, and regards the splendour of 
the spheres alone in their matchless ordering, 
then the thought of evil almost drops from his 
mind, and the reaches of the sky become for him 
a place very good, where the gods are wheeling 
above us in their shining chariots. That is to say, 
in less figurative language, the physical universe 
in its large and general aspect appears to be a 
realm of law and regularity, and this adjustment 
of parts into one harmonious system is for its 
own end.® To rearrange the whole, or any parts 
of the whole, so as to mete out physical justice 
to every human soul as it chooses to live its life 
would throw the cosmos into chaos. If this un- 
thinkable rearrangement were the only course 
open to the judge and creator the result would 
be a terrible discord between nature as a sphere 


5In its general aspect. Plato is aware that the regularity of 
physical law is after all only approximate. This is true in as- 
tronomy, as he expressly declares in The Republic 529c ff; and 
the central myth of the Politicus shows that a narrower inspec- 
tion discovers a principle of disorganization (ovpdutos ériOupia) 
in the physical world never fully subdued. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 149 


of impersonal order and nature as the environ- 
ment of free spontaneous souls; physical law 
would mean moral anarchy. And this in fact is 
the conclusion of those who, seeing only the pres- 
ent, deny the efficacy of Providence. But there 
is another course open to the divine ruler, and the 
present is not all. If it is impossible to recast 
the world to suit the moral needs of each soul, it 
is possible to change the place of the soul in the 
world in such a manner that its environment and 
the accidents of its existence shall be fitted to 
the demands of justice. Again, if the observed 
facts of life do not seem to correspond with such 
a procedure, it is because we know the soul only 
in its present stage. But the soul does not come 
into existence at a moment of time and pass out 
of existence at another moment of time; as it 
shall continue to exist after death, so it existed 
before birth, and this life that we know is only 
one in a long, perhaps an infinite, chain of lives. 
At each birth the soul is assigned to a body and 
placed amid surroundings which are at once the 
award of its acts in a preceding life and the most 
suitable gymnasium to train it for a succeeding 
life. God, Plato says, “has contrived that each 
member of the living world should be so placed as 
most easily and effectively to render virtue vic- 
torious and vice defeated. ‘To this end he has 
contrived that the character developed by us 


150 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


should determine the character of our seat and 
the place occupied by us at any time; but the 
development of our particular character he has 
left to the will of each of us. As a man desires 
and as is the character of his soul, such and in 
such manner, for the most part, each of us is 
born.’ This, roughly sketched, is the dogma 
of transmigration or metempsychosis, by which 
Plato would explain the apparent injustices of 
life and confirm the belief in Providence. 

In the preamble of the Laws, where the inten- 


6 Plato’s theodicy by means of metempsychosis is like that of the 
Hindus save in one important point. The Hindus eliminated the 
question of creation altogether, and thought of the soul as caught 
in a samsdra, or cycle of existences (cf. the Orphic KUKAOS THS 
yevéecews, 0 THS poipas TpoxXos), without beginning. Plato, hav- 
ing the idea of a creator in mind, taught (Timaeus 41z) that the 
souls all came from his hands equal in power and endued with 
equal knowledge, so that in the divergency of their future careers 
they would not reproach their maker if one fell behind the other. 
But the question is inevitable: why, if they were created in every 
way equal and started with no innate difference of disposition, 
should one soul choose righteousness for its portion and another 
evil? Origen fell into the same difficulties by connecting the 
theory of metempsychosis with the act of creation; the Christian, 
indeed, by the nature of his premises, could not escape this in- 
consistency. To Plato it was open to consider the soul as without 
beginning; and in fact this idea is really implied in his theory 
of creation, since the soul-stuff is not created by God ew nihilo 
but has its own existence, And the argument from the conserva- 
tion of energy in the Phaedo and in The Republic 611 shows that 
Plato really regarded the individual souls as without beginning 
as they are without end. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 151 


tion is mainly theological, Plato deals with the 
dogma rationalistically, as it touches on the be- 
ing of God and the reality of Providence; but 
elsewhere he treats the subject more mythologic- 
ally, more, that is to say, from the human side. 
Particularly at the close of The Republic, in the 
story of Er the Pamphylian, he draws it out into 
a splendid allegory of the soul’s progress. This 
Er, it is related, was slain in battle, but on the 
twelfth day, as he was lying on the funeral pyre, 
returned to life, and told a marvellous tale of 
what he had seen and heard in the other world. 
Of his journey to the mysterious tribunal of the 
gods and the judgment there pronounced on the 
souls of the dead, of the penalties endured by the 
evil in the nether regions and the blessings en- 
joyed by the righteous in the celestial sphere, 
we say nothing, except to note that Plato, like 
the Hindus, combines in his account the rather in- 
compatible theories of satisfactory awards in 
heaven and hell and of a rebirth in accord with the 
soul’s previous deeds. In both cases, Greek and 
Hindu, we have apparently a philosophical con- 
ception of good and evil as working themselves 
out in life by their own gravity, so to speak, 
superimposed on a more popular mythology.’ 

7 The two conceptions are reconciled in a manner by the pos- 


sibility of the soul’s escape from the cycle of rebirths into a 
heaven of endless philosophic repose (placed by Timaeus 423 


152 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


However that may be, after a period of a thou- 
sand years the disembodied souls—all save a few 
whose evil is incurable or, as we gather elsewhere, 
who have transcended mortal bonds by the per- 
fection of philosophy—return to the place of 
tribunal, and from there, after a few days, pro- 
ceed to a still more mysterious spot at the centre 
of space, where the three Fates sit at the spindle 
of Necessity, revolving with their hands the 
whorl in which move the sun and moon and earth 
and planets, and presiding over the transit from 
the world of death to the world of life. 

Here a prophet, as Er relates the story, first 
arranged the newcomers in order; then he took 
from the lap of Lachesis lots and samples of 
lives, and, having mounted a high pulpit, spoke 
as follows: ‘Hear the word of Lachesis, the 
daughter of Necessity. Mortal souls, behold a 
new cycle of life and mortality. Your daemon 
will not be allotted to you, but you will choose 
your daemon; and let him who draws the first lot 
have the first choice, and the life which he chooses 
shall be his destiny. Virtue is free, and as a man 
honours or dishonours her he will have more or 
less of her; the responsibility is with the chooser— 
figuratively in the stars from which the souls began their mortal 
existence, but in other dialogues otherwise conceived), and by 


the punishment of an endless hell for those who fall into incurable 
evil. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 153 


God is not responsible.” When the interpreter 
had thus spoken, he scattered lots indifferently 
among them all, and each of them took up the lot 
which fell near him, all but Er himself (he was 
not allowed), and each as he took his lot per- 
ceived the number which he had obtained. Then 
the interpreter placed on the ground before them 
samples of lives; and there were many more lives 
than the souls present, and they were of all sorts. 
And here is the supreme peril of our human state, 
and to this end each one of us should leave every 
other kind of knowledge and seek and follow 
one thing only, if peradventure he may be able 
to learn and discern between good and evil, and so 
to prepare himself to choose always the better 
life when the opportunity comes. 

Now the spectacle before Er was most curious, 
—sad and laughable and strange. He who had 
the first choice came forward and in a moment 
chose the greatest tyranny; his mind having been 
darkened by folly and sensuality, he had not 
thought out the whole matter before he chose, and 
did not at first perceive that he was fated, among 
other evils, to devour his own children. But when 
he had time to reflect, and saw what was in the 
lot, he began to beat his breast and lament over 
his choice, forgetting the proclamation of the 
prophet; for, instead of blaming himself, he ac- 
cused chance and the gods, and everything rather 


154 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


than himself. Strange and manifold were the 
other choices, mostly foolish and with little wis- 
dom. Of all that Er beheld only Odysseus, whose 
lot happened to be the last, took time for delib- 
eration and found what he desired and what had 
been neglected by everybody else. 

So, having chosen, the souls passed on to the 
Fates, who ratified the destiny of each, and 
thence through a scorching heat to the plain of 
Forgetfulness and the river of Unmindfulness. 
And when they had drunk a portion of the water 
of this river and had gone to sleep, there came a 
thunderstorm and an earthquake, and then in an 
instant they were driven upwards in all manner 
of ways to their birth, like shooting stars.* 

Such is Plato’s fullest account of the dogma of 
transmigration. It will sound strange to our 
modern ears, accustomed as we are to a very dif- 
ferent order of ideas, and the first question to 
arise will touch its credibility. The answer, if 
we pause at all for an answer, will depend on 
several considerations: the source of the dogma 
and the extent of its acceptance, the personal im- 
mortality of the soul, the meaning of retribution 
and purification, the reasonableness of the op- 
posed belief in a static heaven and hell, the 
seriousness with which Plato himself held the 
dogma, and the function of mythology. 


8 This story of Er is abridged, with some alterations of lan- 
guage, from the translation by Jowett. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 155 


Now in regard to the first of these considera- 
tions, I have “said, and may need to repeat, that 
the purpose of this work is not to investigate 
sources, nor even to mention them, except in so 
far as they may be essential to an understanding 
of the matter in hand. Apparently the doctrine 
of transmigration came to Plato, directly or 
through the mediation of Socrates, from the 
school of Pythagoras, and from the Orphic and 
Dionysiae worship which was spreading over 
Greece and profoundly modifying the older 
forms of religion. In itself this derivation, 
whether correct or not, would have little signifi- 
cance for us, were not the question of credibility 
affected thereby. One of Plato’s arguments for 
the existence of God is the universality of such a 
faith, as indeed always his appeal is to what 
proves at last to be the deeper common-sense 
of mankind;® and so, in the case of such a 
dogma as that now questioned, it is important to 
know that it was not the invention of a solitary 
thinker, however great his insight and authority, 
but grew out of the religious sense of a highly 

9 For example, in the Gorgias (4744) Socrates, for support of 
the paradox that it is better to suffer punishment for wrong- 
doing than to go unpunished, appeals to the individual insight of 
Polus against the commonly expressed opinion of the world; but 
in the end it turns out that he is summoning as a witness not the 


sense of Polus alone but the deeper common-sense of all man- 
kind against their more superficial views. 


156 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


civilized people. The argument is strengthened 
if to Greece we add the Egyptians” and the Hin- 
dus and all that vast section of the East which 
has taken its religion from India. Metempsy- 
chosis, whatever may be said of it otherwise, is 
not an eccentric or ephemeral belief, but has been, 
and still is, accepted implicitly by a large and 
deeply reflective portion of mankind.” 

As for the second consideration, it is evident 
that transmigration implies the continuance of 
the soul after death, and in fact it is in this theo- 
logical tractate of the Laws that Plato develops 
his final argument for immortality, which we dis- 
cussed in the third chapter of this work. But, so 
far at least as the dogma is employed as a the- 
odicy, or justification of Providence, it must 1m- 
ply also, I think, immortality of a personal sort 
and a continuance of consciousness by memory. 
Buddha, it is true, taught the doctrine of Karma, 
while refusing to consider the question of a per- 
sonal entity ; yet it is also true that part of the en- 
lightenment of the Buddha himself consisted in 
a recovery of the memory of all his past exist- 

10 According to Herodotus (ii, 123) the doctrine of transmigra- 
tion came to Greece from Egypt, but the statement, I believe, is 
discredited by modern Egyptologists. 

11 Only the other day, talking with an enlightened and highly 
educated Hindu, I asked whether the men of his class still held 


to the ancient doctrine of samsdra. His reply was unhesitating 
and emphatic that this was the one thing they never doubted. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 157 


ences. Those who have read the Jdtaka Tales 
will know how important this fact was to the 
religious life of the early community. And how- 
ever resolutely Buddha waived the abstract ques- 
tion, this recovery of memory shows that prac- 
tically something corresponding to our notion of 
personal consciousness was believed to pass on 
from birth to birth. Plato’s position is much 
the same. However dim our present memory 
may be of a former existence, however deep the 
draught of forgetfulness may be which the soul 
was obliged to take before its transit from the 
other world to this Meadow of Calamities, yet 
the past is not all lost. On the contrary, the 
whole force and moral drive of the Platonic phi- 
losophy can be said, in a way, to depend on the 
soul’s faculty of recollection (amnésis). Only 
by this renewal of vision have we any realization 
of the realm of Ideas and of our kinship with the 
gods. And though Plato nowhere states the con- 
clusion categorically, it is not forcing his theories, 
I think, to maintain that for him, as for Buddha, 
there comes to the soul with its final enlighten- 
ment a complete memory of the whole cycle of its 
existence and a serene insight into the everlasting 
justice of the moral law. 

Meanwhile, though memory is still dumb from 
drinking of the river of Lethe, it is possible for 
us, by what may be termed a kind of anticipatory 


158 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


recollection, to shape our course here and now in 
accordance with that law and to grow wise by 
experience. Prosperity and affliction may checker 
our days in such a manner that they seem to 
make a mockery of justice; but it is not really so. 
For we come to our birth trailing with us the 
burden of a previous life, and in the rebuilding 
or neglect of our character we are preparing for 
a life to follow; our present home in the vast 
spaces of nature is at once an award for the past 
and a kind of gymnasium for the future, as if 
this bondage in the body were not a prison house, 
as the Orphic enthusiasts were wont to call it, 
but a house of correction. Plato, we must re- 
member, always thought of punishment as a cor- 
rective rather than an act of vengeance; he was 
even ready to maintain the paradox that it is 
better to suffer the penalties of wrong-doing than 
to go unscathed, and that a wise man who had 
sinned would submit himself voluntarily to con- 
demnation and pains, as we subject a diseased 
body to the surgeon’s knife. And so, in the ad- 
venturous journey of rebirth, it is within our 
choice to take the evils of life sullenly as God’s 
vengeance upon our errors, or to make of them a 
school for the acquisition of wisdom and peace. 
In this way the Platonic economy of metempsy- 
chosis is in harmony with the Aeschylean doc- 
trine of learning by suffering (pathei mathos). 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 159 


And however strange the details of the theory 
may sound in our unaccustomed ears, the prin- 
ciple involved is intrinsically easier to accept, 
less repellent to reason and the innate sense of 
justice, than the belief in the eternity of a static 
heaven and hell. A Dante may charm away our 
repugnance by the magnificence of his poetic 
imagery and by the depth of his moral emotions, 
but at bottom his medieval conception of the 
other world (superficially, but only superficially, 
relieved by a mediating purgatory) is simply hor- 
rible, at least to the judging reason. ‘To compre- 
hend its full enormity we need only peruse such 
a work as Jeremy Taylor’s Contemplation of 
the State of Man, in which the dogma is pre- 
sented, with the eloquence of conviction, no doubt, 
but without the mask of poetic symbolism or al- 
legory. “This is our case,” he exclaims, “I know 
not how we are so pleasant; we have never died, 
we have no experience or skill in a thing of so 
great difficulty; we are only once to die, and in 
that all is at stake; either eternity of torments 
in hell, or of happiness in heaven. . . . O most 
dreadful point, which art the end of time, and 
beginning of eternity! O most fearful instant, 
which shuttest up the prefixed term of this life, 
and determinest the business of our salvation; 
how many things are to pass in thee! In the 
same instant life is to finish, all our works to be 


160 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


examined; and that sentence given, which is to 
be executed for all eternity. O last moment of 
life! O first of eternity! how terrible is the 
thought of thee!’ ‘Terrible indeed if one takes 
literally, as the preacher meant them to be taken, 
the picture of the soul standing at the bar of 
judgment, and the relentless account of the 
eternal award.” If such a conception of the 
future world were all, it were better, as men have 
come to do, to thrust out of mind any thought of 
continuance after death, or else to fall into a 
sentimental hope of universal salvation which 
makes a trifle of sin and a mockery of divine jus- 
tice. Against such a dilemma we may well pause 
to ask ourselves whether there may not be some 
adumbration of a deeper truth in the belief in 
transmigration which has governed the conduct 
of the most religious people of the Orient and 
was adopted by the wisest of occidental philoso- 
phers. 

For certainly Plato accepted the dogma in all 
seriousness. In it he thought he saw an answer 
to those who threw up the seeming inequalities 
of life as a pretext for denying the Providential 

12 For a direct contrast between the Christian scheme with the 
Platonic metempsychosis, see the fragment Ha Libro adversus 
Graecos qui inscribitur Adversus Platonem, De Causa Universi, 
attributed to Hippolytus Portuensis. The author describes the 


undying physical torments of the damned and the eternal physical 
joys of the blessed wth a pious and perfectly lurid realism. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 161 


rule of the world. And having disposed by this 
means of the second of the three atheistical propo- 
sitions, he was enabled to make short shrift with 
the third proposition, of those who admitted the 
fact of Providence, but comforted themselves by 
hoping that the gods might be bought off from 
justice by prayers and sacrifice. If men were 
not responsible for their own fate, if even, as the 
Christians were to hold, the soul came straight 
from the hands of God, with its disposition given 
to it by the fiat of the Creator, then indeed there 
might be some reason for relaxing the chain of 
moral cause and effect, and for setting up the 
mercy of God, or even his easiness of temper, 
as a mitigation of his so-called justice; but from 
this perplexity Plato was freed by a scheme which 
made justice and mercy one, and he could insist 
with unflinching rigour on the inexorability of the 
gods. As Providence is the working of God’s 
goodness and wisdom, so his truth and immut- 
ability are preserved by the implacable sequences 
of the moral law. 

So much can be said in fairness; nevertheless 
there is another aspect of the question which must 
not be entirely overlooked here, though its full 
discussion belongs rather to another place. The 
belief in Providence is equally Christian and 
Platonic; but there is a difference in the emo- 
tional use of the doctrine which goes down to the 


162 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


roots of the religious life, and this difference is 
dependent, in part at least, on the connexion of 
Providence on the one hand with the Christian 
scheme of an eternal static judgment and on the 
other hand with the Platonic justice of transmi- 
gration. Now the logic of our moral sense would 
seem to lie all on the side of justice against judg- 
ment, yet it may still be that in these high mat- 
ters logic is not the last word. What if the Chris- 
tian scheme, by its very hardness and unreason- 
ableness, should throw open the door to a divine 
attribute of mercy to which the human heart can 
cling as it can never quite cling to the inexorable 
God of Plato’s philosophy? I do not know where 
in the Dialogues of Plato we should find a place 
for those sentences of the New Testament which 
transcend all argument: “Come unto me, all ye 
that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give 
you rest,” and, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, 
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” It must 
be admitted that Platonism here misses certain 
human qualities without which religion seems, 
in our weaker hours at least, but a cold consola- 
tion. 'The gods who were worshipped in the 
Academy do not walk so closely beside us in the 
darkness of our earthly ignorance, can never un- 
derstand our needs, or listen so intelligently to 
our appeals, as does the Comforter who was 
promised to the disciples of Jesus. And in the 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 163 


end it may turn out that the Christian dogma, or 
myth if you prefer, lends to the idea of Provi- 
dence a depth of meaning which is in the highest 
degree divine, yet which reason of itself cannot 
fathom.’* But this is by the way. 

“And thus,” Plato says at the close of Er’s tale 
of judgment and metempsychosis, “this myth is 
saved and has not perished, and may save us, if 
we obey it, and we shall pass over the river of 
Forgetfulness and shall not sully our soul.” In 
like manner, at the conclusion in the Gorgias of 
another account of the future life, he declares 
that no doubt his words will be reckoned an idle 
myth such as old wives tell, yet this truth at least 
is involved in them, that it is better to suffer 
wrong than to do wrong and that all our care 
should be directed to being good rather than to 
seeming. And once again, in The Republic, he 
speaks of the usefulness of mythology in dealing 
with matters of which we have no certain 
knowledge and where nothing is left for us but to 

13 For a philosophical treatment of the Christian view of judg- 
ment and mercy I may refer the reader to Clement’s Quis Dives 
§§30, 40, particularly the passage in the former section beginning, 
be yap povw Swardv ddeow dpaptidv rapacxécOar Kai pi do- 
yioac$at mapartmpata, and the passage in §40 beginning, ds 
povos Tov dmdvtwv olds Té éoTw Gmpakta ToLnoaL TA TETpaypEeVa 
éXéw TO wap’ avrov. Profounder in its psychology and philosophy 
is Newman’s sermon on Peace and Joy amid Chastisement (Par- 
ochial and Plain Sermons IV, viii). 


382D 


164 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


shape our fiction as best we can to the hidden 
truth. It is clear then that, however seriously 
Plato took the doctrine of metempsychosis, he 
shows by his resort to mythology that it belongs 
to a sphere of religion very different from the 
primary facts of philosophy; we have come a 
long way from our starting point. 

Philosophy has its own justice, discovered in 
that law of the soul which binds together right- 
eousness and happiness, sin and misery, as the in- 
separable facts of our conscious being. With the 
addition of the theological propositions of God 
and Providence we enter into a new realm of 
relations which demands that the apparent dis- 
crepancies of pleasures and pains shall be brought 
into harmony with the philosophical law of jus- 
tice. To Plato the method that seemed to fulfil 
these conditions for the human soul was the myth 
of metemspychosis, and on this myth he allowed 
his imagination to play after the manner of a 
great poet: “the philomyth is a philosopher,” as 
Aristotle says.** The truth Plato sought to make 
real was about the same as that to which John 
Stuart Mill came at the end of his days: “All 
the probabilities in case of a future life are that 
such as we have been made or have made ourselves 
before the change, such we shall enter into the 
life hereafter.”** 'The visualization, so to speak, 


14 Metaph. I, ii, 8: Awd Kai 6 piropvOos hirocodds rus eo. 
15 Three Essays in Religion 211. 


PROVIDENCE AND JUSTICE 165 


of this truth in the soul’s adventure before the 
judgment seat of the gods and its rebirth in one 

bodily form or another, is true fiction. ‘To thephaedrus 245¢ 
clever men of this world such a demonstration will 

be incredible, to the wise it will bring its own cre- 
dentials.” 

Thus, in mythology, which combines with 
theology and philosophy to round out the re- 
ligious life, there are two factors to be distin- 
guished: the truth that is clothed upon by the 
imagination, and the garment itself; the certainty 
of the moral law embodied and the probability of 
the particular form of embodiment. A myth is 
false and reprehensible in so far as it misses or 
distorts the primary truth of philosophy and the 
secondary truth of theology; it becomes more 
probable and more and more indispensable to the 
full religious life as it lends insistence and reality 
to those truths and answers to the daily needs of 
the soul. Perhaps the first requirement of sound 
religion is just the due recognition of these two 
elements in mythology, neither on the one hand 
giving to myth the character of philosophic truth, 
nor on the other hand carrying over to philosophy 
the conjectural character of myth. By the for- 
mer error faith assumes the hard rigidity of fanat- 
icism, until doubts creep in, and then, when the 
myth has lost its grip upon us, the whole fabric 
of religion crumbles away together. In the sec- 


166 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ond case, by seeing in philosophy nothing dif- 
ferent in kind from the probabilities of mytholo- 
gy, we leave faith without any solid foundation; 
religion may be a useful illusion, to preserve if 
we can, but it will speak to us without authority 
or power. It would seem a simple matter to 
maintain such a distinction; in practice the sim- 
plest truths are the most difficult. 

Metemspychosis is Plato’s mythological treat- 
ment of the cosmic destinies of the human soul; 
it remains to follow him into the greater myth of 
the cosmos itself. 


CHAPTER VII 


MYTHOLOGY 
TRANSLATION FROM THE TIMAEUS 


In the first place, then, in my opinion we must 
distinguish these two things: What is that 
which always is and has no becoming,’ and 
what is that which, always becoming, never 


1 Here at the outset we are met by one of those insuperable 
difficulties which are the despair of the translator. There is no 
verb in English which conveys the various meanings of gignomai, 
“to become,” “to be made,” “to be created,” “to exist,’ etc. Fur- 
thermore Greek has a whole group of words connected radically 
with gignomai, for which English has no corresponding group 
derived from a single root. The translator is forced to make 
what shift he can. His perplexity is increased by the fact that 
Greek has another group of words connected with gennad, “‘to 
beget,” “to generate,” which in their passive forms run parallel 
with the group connected with gignomai, and can searcely be dis- 
tinguished in English. Thus, connected with gignomai, we have 
genétos, meaning “created,” while gennétos, connected with gen- 
nad, means “begotten,” “generated,” “born.” In the Timaeus 
these two groups are used by Plato with no metaphysical distinc- 
tion; just as (see infra) he speaks of God as the maker (poiétés) 
and father (patér) of the world. The Christian writers, however, 
who draw so much of their theology from the Timaeus, will base 
the whole fabric of orthodoxy on a distinction between the world 
as created (genétos) by God and Christ as begotten (gennétos) 
by God. Of all these verbal associations and distinctions English 
can give but the roughest notion. 


167 


27D 


28 


168 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


is? The one, being always the same, we 
comprehend by thought with reason; the other, 
becoming and perishing, never really being, 
we guess at by opinion with unreasoning 
perception. Now all that becomes does so of 
necessity by some cause; for it is impossible that 
anything should have generation without a cause. 
And it follows that the creator of any object 
who fashions its form and faculty with his eyes 
ever set on immutability, and with the immutable 
as his pattern, of necessity produces a fair work, 
whatever it be; but if his eyes are set on what 
has become and he uses this product of generation 
as a pattern, his work is not fair. And so of the 
whole round world (cosmos I will call it or what- 
soever other name will be most acceptable to it), 
we should first consider—what lies at the begin- 
ning of every consideration—whether it always 
was, without any beginning in generation, or has 
become, with its start from some beginning. It 
has become; for it is visible and tangible and has 
body, and all such things are sensible, and things 
sensible, matters of opinion and sense, are phe- 
nomena of becoming and generation. And of 
that which becomes we say there is a necessity that 
it became by some cause. 

No doubt it is hard to discover the maker and 
father of the universe, and impossible, when dis- 
covered, to express him to all men; and here again, 


THE TIMAEUS 169 


in regard to the world, we are confronted with 
this consideration: after which of the patterns 
did the builder fashion it, whether after the im- 
mutable and unchanging, or after that which has 
become? If then this cosmos is fair and the cre- 
ator good, evidently he had his eyes upon the 
eternal; but if the contrary (which is sacrilege 
for any man to say), then upon what has become. 
Now it is quite clear that his eyes were upon the 
eternal, since the world is the fairest possible 
creation, and he is the best of causes.” And hav- 
ing been made thus, it was modeled upon that 
which is comprehensible to reason and thought 
and upon that which is immutable. Wherefore 
also it follows quite necessarily that this cosmos 
is an image of something. Now it is most im- 
portant that the beginning of any subject should 
be according to nature. Hence in our distinction 
of the image and its pattern our discourse should 
be affiliated to those things of which it is the in- 
terpreter. It should be stable and assured when 
interpreting what is stable and fixed and ration- 
ally evident (failing not of that degree of in- 
vincible certainty which is possible and proper for 
discourse); whereas when we deal with that 
which is but a likeness and image of the immut- 
able, our discourse in the same manner ought to 


2 Thales had said before Plato: KdAAvoTov KOopos, moinua yap 
Geov. 


29 


170 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


be content to aim atlikelihood.’ As being is to 

“becoming, so is truth to belief. If, then, amid 
the many views that may be held of the gods and 
the creation of the universe we are unable to make 
our discourse in every way consistent with itself 
and exact, there is no reason to wonder; rather, 
we ought to be content if we can attain a high 
degree of probability, remembering that I who 
speak and you who judge have the nature of men, 
and that it behooves us to accept of these things a 
story or myth based on likelihood, and to look 
for nothing beyond. 

Let us then declare for what cause the author 
of the universe constructed it. He was good,‘ 


8 This distinction between truth, or knowledge, and belief is of 
the first importance in the study of philosophy and religion. In 
the great discourse on goodness and the Good which closes the 
sixth book of The Republic and runs into the seventh book, and 
which may be called the consummation of the Platonic philosophy, 
Plato thought he was dealing with truths of which we have im- 
mediate and certain knowledge. In the Timaeus, where he is 
dealing with the same ideas mythically, he is content with a de- 
gree of belief or conviction. His word for “belief,’ zioris, will 
be used by Christians for a “faith” which is supposed to surpass 
the knowledge of philosophy. 


**Aya0es jv. In the conclusion of the sixth book of The Re- 
public Plato had come very close, from a confusion of the final 
and the efficient cause, to identifying God and the Idea of the 
Good. Here, in his maturer thought, he distinguishes clearly be- 
tween the two. God, as good, is the efficient cause, the Ideal world, 
including the Good, is the final cause. Man, as we shall see, is 
to be like God as an efficient cause in the world. 


THE TIMAEUS 171 


and in the good there never can be envy of aught. 
And, being free from this quality, he desired 
all things to be made as like to himself as pos- 
sible.” This is that sovereign principle of crea- 
tion and of the cosmos which we most certainly 
shall be right in accepting from wise men. For 
God, in his desire that all things should be good 
and that, so far as possible, there should be noth- 
ing evil, took all that was visible as it came to 
him, lying not in a state of rest but moving 
without harmony or measure; and out of disorder 
he brought it into order, thinking such a state 
altogether better than the other. It was not, nor 
is it, right that the best agent should produce 
other work than what is fairest. Accordingly, on 
consideration, he found that of things by nature 
visible no work lacking reason would ever be 
fairer than one with reason,* the whole compared 
with the whole, and that it is impossible for rea- 
son to accrue to anything without soul. For this 
consideration he composed the universe by 

5 Observe the recurrence of this phrase, “as possible”; it is the 


mark of dualism, distinguishing Plato’s God from the Christian 
God. 


6 Reason, vous, a word not easy to translate owing to its philo- 
sophical content. It is in general the “mind,” or “intelligence,” 
or even “spirit,” as contrasted with sensation and the phenomenal 
order of things; denoting rather the intuitional or idealistic 
“reason” than the rationalistic. A little below its cognate, vonrd, 
is translated “of the Ideal order.” 


30 


31 


172 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


fashioning reason in soul, and soul in body,’ in 
such a manner as to produce a work fairest and 
best in nature. So at least, following the prob- 
able account, we must say that this cosmos was 
created as a creature with soul and reason,’ veri- 
tably by the providence of God. 

This being settled, our next task is to say in 
the resemblance of what creature the author of 
the world constructed it. We will not condes- 
cend to any of those creatures that can be classed 
as partial (since nothing resembling the imper- 
fect can ever be fair), but will suppose that of 
all creatures it is most like that of which the other 
creatures are individually and generically parts. 
For the pattern embraces in itself all creatures of 
the Ideal order, just as this cosmos embraces us 
and all other animals that belong to the visible 
order. And thus, desiring to render it as similar 
as possible to the most fair and altogether per- 
fect of the Ideal, God fashioned it as one visible 
creature having within itself all creatures natur- 


7 This, later, will be the Plotinian evolution of the world from 
God to nous, to psyché, to body. But the Neoplatonic conception 
of emanation, or evolution in this sense, is totally foreign to 
Plato. Psyché, soul, is the whole conscious element of man. 

8 For the influence of this concepton of the world as Caov 
épyvxov évvovy te in Plotinus, Origen, St. Augustine, Bruno and 
Fechner see Inge, Christian Mysticism 29. But it ‘is important to 
note that there is no hint of pantheism in Plato. His God is 
transcendent, not immanent. 


THE TIMAEUS 173 


ally akin to it. You ask whether we are right in 
calling it one universe, or should have spoken 
more correctly of many or an infinite number? 
One; since it will have been created according to 
the pattern. For that which embraces all Ideal 
creatures could never exist as a second with an- 
other; otherwise there would necessarily exist 
about these two another creature of which they 
would be part, and this world would be said more 
properly to have been made like that embracing 
creature than like the two embraced. In order, 
then, that in the matter of unity it might be like 
the perfect creature, the maker made not two 
worlds or an infinite number of worlds, but this 
universe exists as one only-begotten, and ever 
shall exist.... 

This was the design of the ever-living God 
concerning the god to be, by which he made it 
smooth and even, spreading in all directions 
equally from the centre, a whole and perfect body 
composed of perfect bodies. And in the midst 
thereof he set soul, extending it throughout, and 
even enveloping the body with it round about; 
and established the one only heaven-bounded 
world as a sphere revolving in solitude, by reason 
of its virtue content with its own society and 
needing no other, known and friendly itself suf- 
ficiently to itself. On all these accounts he begot 
it a happy god. 


34a 


174 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Now God did not contrive the soul as younger 
than body, though it appears later as we describe 
it; for when joining them he would not have per- 
mitted the elder to be ruled by the younger. But 
as we lay hold of things very much by chance 
and at random, so we speak; whereas he fash- 
ioned soul as earlier and elder than body in birth 
and virtue, to be the mistress and ruler of what 
was to be ruled, fashioning it from the following 
elements and in the following manner. From 
the indivisible and ever immutable essence and 
from that which becomes divisible by association 
with bodies, from these two, the nature of the 
Same and the nature of the Other, he mingled a 
third form of intermediary essence, and fash- 
ioned it in the same way between what was in- 
divisible of them and what was divisible in bodies. 
And taking these three he mingled them all into 
one form, forcing the nature of the Other, though 
hard to mix, into adaptation to the Same. And 
having mingled the two with the essence and 
having made one out of the three, he again di- 
vided the whole into as many parts as was proper, 
each part being compounded of the Same and the 
Other and essence.’. . . 


® By this allegory Plato evidently meant to indicate the dual 
nature of the soul as akin at once to the eternal and im- 
mutable and to the ephemeral and mutable. So far the matter 
is clear and corresponds with the facts of consciousness. But 
the attempts to penetrate more deeply into his supposed meaning 


THE TIMAEUS 175 


When the composition of the soul was finished 
according to the mind of the maker, thereupon 
he built up within it all the corporeal, and fitted 
them together by setting centre to centre. And 
the soul, inwoven from the centre every way out 
to the extremity of the heaven-bounded world 
and enveloping it round from without, so revolv- 
ing within itself, started upon the divine begin- 
ning of endless and rational life for alltime. The 
body of the world was made visible, but the soul 
herself is invisible, partaking of reason and har- 
mony, by the best of the Ideal and eternal created 
the best of things begotten. Wherefore, as 
blended from three elements, from the nature of 
the Same and the nature of the Other and from 
essence, and as divided and bound together in due 
proportion, and revolving itself upon itself, when- 
ever soul comes into contact with anything of 
scattered essence or with anything of undivided 
essence, a motion goes all through it, and it an- 
nounces what things are the same and what are 
other, and in what relation, place, manner, and 
time each is to each and is affected by each, 


—to explain rationally the nature of the bond between these two 
elements and to define the exact status of reason, nous, as a part 
of, or addition to, the soul—have not been illuminating. Plato 
knew where to stop. In particular, the use of this symbolism by 
Plotinus should have been a warning to later metaphysicians 
against the futility of pretending to know what we do not know. 


36D 


37 


176 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


whether in the mutable sphere of becoming or as 
regards the everlasting and immutable. .. . 

And when the Father who begot the world be- 
held it in motion, as it were a living idol of the 
eternal gods, he was delighted, and in his 
pleasure formed the design of making it still more 
like its pattern. Accordingly, as the pattern hap- 
pens to be an eternal creature, he undertook to 
perfect the universe so far as possible in the same 
way. As I have said, the nature of the creature 
happened to be eternal, and it was not possible 
to accord this character in its completeness to 
what was begotten; but he took thought to make 
a certain moving image of eternity, and so or- 
dered the heaven-bounded world as to make it an 
eternal image, moving in number, of the eternity 
abiding in unity; and this we have named time.” 


10 For a metaphysical discussion of Plato’s conception of time 
see the notes on pages 230 and 231 of Mansel’s Limits of Religious 
Thought. But I think Plato was not considering time meta- 
physically, and wisely so. Quid est ergo tempus, said Augustine 
(Conf. xi, 14). Si nemo ex me quaerat, scio; si quaerenti explicare 
velim, nescio. This is the common sense of a great philosopher. 
In Plato’s mythical account of time, I take it, he is simply ex- 
pressing the fact of our consciousness of life in succession and 
mutation and of our consciousness of that which changes not. 
Vaughan was speaking as a true Platonist when he wrote: 


“I saw Eternity the other night 
Like a great Ring of pure and endless light, 
All calm, as it was bright, 
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years 
Driv’n by the spheres 
Like a vast shadow mov’d, in which the world 
And all her train were hurld.” 


THE TIMAEUS 177 


For days and nights and months and years did 
not exist before the heavens became, but their 
genesis was contrived by him with the making 
of the heavens. All these are portions of time, 
and “was” and “shall be,” as belonging to genesis, 
are forms of time, which we unwittingly and 
wrongly impute to the eternal Being. No doubt 
we use the words “was” and “is” and “shall be,” 
yet “is” alone pertains to being, if we speak cor- 
rectly, while “was” and “shall be” are terms that 
belong properly to the world of becoming which 
moves in time. For these are of motion; but it 
behooves not that which is ever immutable and 
motionless to be becoming older or younger in 
time, nor yet to become, nor to have become, 
nor to be in the future, nor in general to suffer 
anything whatsoever that belongs by becoming 
to the moving objects of perception,—rather 
such things are the created forms of time that 
imitates eternity and revolves by number... . 

Time, then, was created with the heaven- 
bounded world, to the end that, being begotten 
together, they might be dissolved together, if ever 
there should be a dissolution of them—created 
after the pattern of the eternal nature, to the end 
that it might resemble this to the utmost degree 
possible; for the pattern exists through all etern- 
ity, in pure being, and the image exists through 
all time on and on, yet as generated and being 


38 


39E 


40 


178 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


and about to be. Such were the plan and pur- 
pose of God for the generation of time, and thus, 


/for the begetting of time, were created the sun 


and moon and five other stars called planets, for 
the division and preservation of the numbers of 
time. And having made their several bodies, God 
set them in the orbits which are the course of the 
circle of the Other, seven stars in seven orbits.... 

Up to the generation of time the work of crea- 
tion took the likeness of that of which it was the 
image, but it still remained unlike in so far as it 
did not yet embrace within itself all creatures. 
And this defect he now made good by moulding 
it after the nature of the pattern. As reason 
perceives what and what kind of forms exist in 
the Ideal creature, such and so many forms he 
thought this world creature also ought to have. 
Now there are four classes: one the heavenly race 
of gods, another winged and living im the air, a 
third the aquatic species, and a fourth that of 
the dry land. Accordingly, the form of the di- 
vine race he created for the most part of fire, that 
it might be the fairest to look upon and the most 
shining; and likening it to the whole he made it 
spherical, and set it in the orbit of the Same to 
follow that which is strongest and wisest, dis- 
tributing it about the whole circle of the firma- 
ment, to make of heaven a true cosmos decked out 


THE TIMAEUS 179 


in manifold beauty.** And to each divine star he 


gave two motions: the one uniform about its own 
axis, as its thoughts are ever the same with itself 
and upon the same things, the other in a forward 
direction, as each is controlled by the regular 
revolution of the Same. But in relation to the 
other five motions’ he left them unmoved and 
at rest, in order that each of them might enjoy 
the highest possible excellence. For such a cause 
were created all the fixed stars, which abide for- 
ever as divine and eternal creatures, revolving 
in their immutable orbits; whereas the planets 
that wander and change their place about the 
ecliptic, were created in the manner aforesaid.” 
And the earth, our nurse, a body globed about the 
pole stretched through it as an axis, he contrived 
as the guardian and creator of night and day, the 
first and eldest of all the gods that have been 
generated within the heavens... . 

The generation of the other divinities [dae- 
mons] is a matter beyond our saying and know- 

11Kéapov Gdnfiwov adtd reroixiApévov civat Kal ddov. 
Elsewhere (Republic 529c) Plato calls the stars Ta & TO 
ovpave wo.kiApata, divine, indeed, and radiant, yet visible and 
imperfect symbols only of the Ideal spheres, manifestations of 
what to St. Paul was 7) woAvoikiAos codia Tov Oeov, “the mani- 
fold wisdom of God” (Eph. iii, 10). No English translation can 
convey the vivid and manifold meaning of the Greek rouktAos. 


12 Backward, upward, downward, to the right, to the left. 
13 See ante, 38c, 


41 


180 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ing. Here we must accept the words of those 
who spake of old, who were the offspring of the 
gods, as they say, and had clear knowledge of 
their ancestors—certainly, we cannot disbelieve 
the children of the gods, though they speak with- 
out probable or positive demonstration, but in 
obedience to the law we must believe their asser- 
tion that they speak of things akin to themselves. 
Thus, then, let us hold and repeat their account 
of the generation of these gods.* Of Earth and 
Heaven the children were Oceanus and Tethys, 
from whom sprang Phorcys and Cronos and 
Rhea and those with them; from Cronos and 
Rhea sprang Zeus and Hera and all whom we 
know as their reputed brethren, and from these 
still other offspring. When, then, all the gods 
had been generated, both those that move visibly 
above and those that manifest themselves to us 
as they desire, he that begot the universe spake 
to them in this wise: 


14 According to Oakesmith, The Religion of Plutarch 125, this 
is “a passage charged with the most mordant irony against the 
national religious tradition”; and so it is understood by other 
interpreters. I do not feel the irony, and think the words are to 
be taken quite sincerely. Compare Philebus 16c: ot pev radavol, 
Kpeltroves Hav Kal éyyuTépw Gewv oikovvtes; and see Phaedrus 
273n. Plato was ready to criticise sharply the immoral stories 
about the gods, but it was a part of his reverence for tradition 
to accept rather simply the gods of the pantheon as hints and 
symbols of the divine power in the world. 


THE TIMAEUS 181 


“Gods of gods,*° the works of which I am 
creator and father, as they were made by me, are 
indissoluble except by my will. True it is that: 
everything bound can be loosened, yet it is the act 
of an evil one to will the loosening of that which 
is well fitted and in good case. Wherefore, since 
you have been created, you are indeed not abso- 
lutely immortal or indissoluble, yet shall you suf- 
fer neither dissolution nor the lot of death, since 
in my will you have a bond still greater and more 
masterful than those wherewith you were bound 
together when you were created. Now, there- 
fore, pay heed to what I say and declare unto 
you. There remain yet unbegotten three mortal 
races, and until these are created the world will 
be imperfect; for it will not have within itself all 
the creature races, as it ought to have if it is to 
be finished and perfect. But if these were created 
and partook of life through me, they would be 
equal to gods. Wherefore, to the end that they 
may be mortal and that this universe may be 
truly a universe, do you turn according to nature 
to the making of the creatures, imitating my 
power as shown in your generation. Now as to 
the element in them worthy to be named with the 
immortals, the divine part and the ruling guide 
to those of them that are willing ever to follow 
justice and you—this element it is for me to sow 

15 This I take to be merely an amplified way of saying “Gods!” 


182 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


and hand over to you as a beginning. For the 
rest, you shall make and beget them as creatures, 
weaving the mortal upon the immortal, and you 
shall cause them to grow by providing food, and 
shall receive them back when they perish.” 

Thus he spake; and again into the bowl where- 
in before he had mingled and blended the soul 
of the universe he poured what remained of the 
divine elements, mingling them in the same gen- 
eral manner, though they were no longer of the 
same purity but of the second and the third 
quality.’ Then, having composed the whole, he 
divided it into souls equal in number to the stars, 
and distributed them, one soul to each star.” So, 


16 One of the dark, but innocent, passages of Plato that gath-_ 
ered volume and mischief as it was repeated by later metaphy- 
sicians. It first recurs in one of the Epistles (ii, 312z) attributed 
to Plato, where it is already transformed into a kind of mystifi- 
cation in regard to the divine nature. Taken from this source, 
it plays an immensely important part in the theosophies of the 
second and third centuries a. p. It would be hard to say how 
much the Christian doctrine of the Trinity owes to it. See Caesar 
Morgan, The Trinity of Plato 43. 

17It is a question whether Plato here is thinking of portions 
of soul-stuff which are to be used by the star-gods in creating 
individual souls, or of soul already individualized. In the latter 
case the number of individual souls in the universe would be 
equal to that of the fixed stars. In either case these souls or 
portions of soul-stuff are not to be confused with the divine 
souls who inform the fixed stars and are the secondary gods. 
Archer-Hind and, apparently, Martin interpret Plato as_ re- 
ferring to unindividualized portions of soul-stuff. Synesius, 
Stewart, and Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, among others, think that 


THE TIMAEUS 183 


mounting each as in a chariot, he displayed to 
them the nature of the universe, and told them 
its fated laws:** how that their first incarnation 
should be ordained the same for all, in order that 
no one might suffer disadvantage at his hands; 
how that they must be sown in the organs of time, 
each in that most suitable to it, and be born as the 
most God-fearing of creatures, and how that, the 
nature of humanity being double, the stronger 
and better part should be the sex hereafter to be 
called man. And he declared that, when of neces- 
sity they had been implanted in bodies which 
were ever undergoing addition in this part and 
subtraction in that, there would necessarily be for 
all of them, first a common innate faculty of 
sense derived from inevitable affections, secondly 
love mixed with pleasure and pain, and added 
to these fear and wrath and all the following 


Plato had in mind individual souls. I am inclined to accept the 
latter interpretation. 

18 This is the doctrine of reminiscence expressed in a mythical 
form somewhat different from that of the Phaedrus, All that fol- 
lows: the incarnate birth of the souls in the organs of time (i.e. 
on the earth or one of the planets), their reception back into 
their starry homes or their transmigration in accordance with 
their good and evil deeds—all this is to be the work of the sec- 
ondary gods. But through all the chance and change and ob- 
scurity of mortal life, Plato would say, each soul retains a dim 
recollection of its original purity as it came from the hand of 
God, and has the power to rekindle that recollection to perfect 
knowledge. 


42 


184 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


train of emotions and all of a contrary nature.” 
If they mastered these passions, they should live 
in justice, but if mastered by these, in injustice. 
He that lived well the appointed time should 
pass again to the home of his kindred star, there 
to enjoy a happy and congenial life. But failing 
this, he should be changed in his second incarna- 
tion to the nature of a woman; and if still in this 
case he ceased not from wickedness, according 
to the manner of his evil-doing he should change 
always to some such bestial nature as resembled 
the character born within him. Nor should he 
rest from change and labour until, by conforming 
to the revolution of the Same and Like within 
him, with the help of reason he had mastered the 
great burden that should cling about him from 
fire and water and air and earth, a turbid and 


19 With this and the corresponding passage at the close of the 
present translation should be read Swinburne’s chorus in the 
Atalanta: 


“Before the beginning of years 

There came to the making of man 
Time, with a gift of tears, 

Grief, with a glass that ran; 
Pleasure, with pain for leaven; 

Summer, with flowers that fell; 
Remembrance fallen from heaven, 

And madness risen from hell; 
Strength without hands to smite; 

Love that endures for a breath: 
Night, the shadow of light, 

And life, the shadow of death.”. . . 


THE TIMAEUS 185 


irrational accretion, and so had returned to that 
most excellent state which he had enjoyed at 
first.°° All these laws God established and pro+ 
nounced to the souls, to the end that he might 
be guiltless of the evil hereafter incurred by any 


of them.” And thereupon he sowed some of\ 


them on the earth, some on the moon, and some 
upon the other organs of time. And after the 
sowing he committed to the new gods the mould- 
ing of mortal bodies, to create and rule what re- 
mained to be added to the soul of man and all 
that appertains to soul and body, and to govern 
the mortal creature as fairly and well as they 
could, in so far as it should not bring evils upon 
itself by its own responsibility. 

Now when he had given all these directions, 
God abode in his own accustomed character. 
And as he so abode, his children took thought of 
their father’s order and obeyed it. Taking the 
immortal beginning of a mortal creature, in imi- 
tation of their creator, they borrowed from the 
cosmos portions of fire and earth and water and 
air which were to be rendered back, and fastened 
these together, not with those indissoluble bonds 
by which they themselves were held together, but 
by welding the masses with many rivets invisible 


20 Plato has expressed the same idea more picturesquely in the 
famous simile of Glaucus (Republic 611p). 

21 For God’s freedom from the responsibility for evil, compare 
Republic 379c, 617z; Laws 900r, 9044; Theaetetus 176a, et al. 


43 


46c¢ 


186 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


for smallness. So they made individual bodies 
out of all these, and bound the revolutions of the 
immortal soul in a body subject to continual in- 
flux and efflux.... 

[ Here follows ‘“‘a probable account” of the re- 
sults of this union of the mortal and the immortal, 
with an explanation of the operation of the senses, 
particularly vision, the noblest of them all. The 
story continues: ] 


All these matters [the material elements of 
sensation] belong to the auxiliary causes which 
God uses as means to work out the idea of the 
best so far as is possible. By the mass of men, 
however, they are regarded not as auxiliary but as 
primary causes of all things, as doing the work 
of creation by cooling and heating, solidifying 
and dissolving, and the like; though in fact they 
are incapable of possessing any reason or mind 
for any purpose. For it must be said that to 
soul alone belongs the possession of reason (and 
this is invisible, whereas fire and water and earth 
and air are all visible bodies) ; and he who is a 
lover of reason and knowledge must pursue first 
the causes belonging to the rational order, and 
secondly those that are of the order of things 
moved by other things and so of necessity pass- 
ing the motion along. And this course we must 
follow: we must state both classes of causes, but 
separately those that, working rationally, are 


THE TIMAEUS 187 


creative of things good and fair, and those that, 
being destitute of wisdom, produce now and again 
an unordered work of chance. We have already 
sufficiently set forth the auxiliary causes by which 
the eyes possess their faculty; now we must state 
the greatest blessing which the eyes effect and for 
which God bestowed them upon us.* 


In my judgment vision is the cause of the _ 


greatest blessing to us, since but for the spectacle 
of the stars and the sun and the heavens no word 
of our present discourse about the universe would 
have been uttered. But now the sight of day and 
night, of the months and revolving years, the 
equinoxes and solstices, has brought the inven- 
tion of number, and has given us the conception 
of time and our zest to investigate the nature of 
the universe. From which things we have de- 
rived philosophy, than which no greater good has 
come or will come to mortal men as a gift of the 
gods. This, I say, is the most blessed use of the 
eyes. And why should we celebrate the lesser 


22 There might seem to be some confusion here, since vision and 
the eyes are not the work of God but of the secondary gods. 
But the activity of these lower divinities is all under the com- 
mand and direction of the supreme Father. Indeed, the dis- 
tinction between God and the secondary gods should not be taken 
too literally; it is merely Plato’s mythological expression of the 
inscrutable nature of the divine, as in itself perfect to the desire 
of the imagination yet somehow involved in a creation which is 
full of imperfection. 


47 


188 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


blessings, the deprivation of which by blindness 
even he who is no philosopher would bewail and 
vainly lament? It is for us to declare the true 
cause of vision, that God invented it and be- 
stowed it upon us in order that, beholding the , 
“evolutions of reason in the heavens, we might“ 
use them to the profit of the revolutions of mind 
within ourselves, as these are akin to those, the 
perturbed to the unperturbed, and in order that, 
by learning and by partaking of the right course 
of thought as displayed in nature, imitating the 
divine circuits that know no wandering whatso- 
ever, we might bring under control the wandering 
circuits in ourselves. And of sound and hearing 
there is a similar account, that they were bestowed 
on us by the gods for a like purpose and for the 
like reasons. For speech is ordered to this same 
end, to which it contributes so large a part; and 
music, in so far as it uses vocal sound, was 
granted for the sake of harmony; and harmony, 
with its motions kindred to the inner revolutions 
of the soul, is a gift of the Muses to him who 
brings reason with him to their society, a gift 
bestowed not for the sake of unthinking pleasure, 
as now its use seems to be, but as an ally against 
the discordant revolution of the soul that has 
arisen within us, to bring it into order and into 
concord with itself. And rhythm also was given 
by the Muses for the same purpose, as a supple- 


THE TIMAEUS 189 


ment for the lack of measure and grace that pre- 
vails in most of us. 


What we have said hitherto, with slight excep- 
tions, was concerned with exhibiting the things 
created through reason; but we must now add to 
our exposition the things that become out of 
necessity. For the genesis of this cosmos is a 
mingled birth, a concurrence of necessity and 
reason; and the beginning was thus: reason got 
control of necessity by persuading it to bring on 
most things to their best end as they came into 
existence; and so and in such manner, by the act 
of necessity submitting to reasonable persuasion, 
the universe was composed. If then we would 
describe truly the origin of this world as it is, 
we must consider this mixture of the errant cause 
and the nature of its operation. That is to say, 
we must go back, and, taking up another first 
principle involved in the nature of things, pro- 
ceed again from the beginning in our present 
exposition as in our former. We must look into 
the nature of fire and water and air and earth 
before the genesis of the world, and into the 
primeval state. Until now no one has ever indi- 
cated the manner of their generation, but we talk 
as if men knew what fire and the rest were, as- 
suming them as the final elements, the alphabet 
so to speak, of the universe, whereas, properly 


48 


190 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


speaking, no one who reflected for a moment 
would represent them as belonging even to the 
class of syllables. 

Our way then lies as follows: it is not our busi- 
ness now to state the [metaphysical] first prin- 
ciple, or principles, however the case may be, un- 
derlying all things; and this, if for no other rea- 
son, because we have difficulty enough after the 
manner of our present exposition in dealing with 
probabilities. Therefore you must not think I 
ought to enter upon such a discourse, nor could 
I for my part persuade myself that I should be 
justified in undertaking so great a task. Ac- 
cording then to the rule laid down when we 
started, that. we should be content to aim at like- 
lihood, I will endeavour to make my account of 
each thing and all things probable, more prob- 
able than any other, taking up the subject again 
from the beginning. And so, once more with a 
prayer to God the saviour that he may guide us 
through a strange and unfamiliar discourse to the 
safe opinion of probability, let us start afresh. 

In beginning anew our exposition of the uni- 
verse we must distinguish more broadly than be- 
fore. ‘Then we made a double classification, but 
now we must indicate a third class. For our 
former argument the two kinds were sufficient, 
one the hypothesis of a pattern, belonging to the 
realm of intelligible and immutable being, the 


THE TIMAEUS 191 


other an imitation of the pattern, created and 
visible. We did not then distinguish a third kind, 
deeming the two would be sufficient; but now our 
argument seems to force upon us a dim and dif- 
ficult kind which we must try to bring before you. 
What function, then, and nature should be at- 
tributed to it? This, I suppose, that it is the re- 
ceptacle and as it were nurse of all creation... . 

But we must endeavour to give a clearer ac- 
count of the matter. Suppose a man were to 
mould all kinds of shapes out of gold, continually 
changing one shape into another; then suppose 
we should point to one of these and ask him what 
it was. Far the safest and truest answer for 
him would be to say that it was gold, and not to 
speak of the triangle or any other shape into 
which he had moulded it as of a thing really be- 
ing, since these shapes are changing even while 
he names them; and he should be content if an 
object can be called such or such [rather than 
actually this or that]. Now the same account 
holds good of the nature that admits all sorts of 
corporeal forms. It must itself be spoken of as 
always the same; for it does not in the least de- 
part from its own function—rather it admits all 
things without ever itself in any way merging 
into a form like any of those that enter into it. 
As the natural recipient of any impression it 
lies there, moved and transfigured by the enter- 


49 


51 


192 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ing forms and appearing always different be- 
cause of these; but the forms that enter and pass 
out are imitations of the eternal realities, copied 
from them in a manner wonderful and hard to 
explain, which we shall consider at another time. 
For the present at least we need only bear in 
mind the three kinds: that which becomes, that 
in which it becomes, and that from which the be- 
coming takes its likeness. Further, we may liken 
the recipient to a mother, that from which to a 
father, and the nature between these to a child; 
and we may understand that, if there is to be a 
copying such as to present every variety of ap- 
pearance, the recipient in which the copy arises 
cannot be rightly constituted unless it is itself 
without any of those forms it is to receive from 
without. ... 

Therefore the mother and receptacle of this 
visible and otherwise perceptible world of crea- 
tion we will call neither earth nor air nor fire nor 
water, neither anything created out of these nor 
anything from which these are created; but shall 
not err if we call it a separate kind, invisible and 
formless, all-receiving, and in some most extra- 
ordinary manner partaking of the Ideal and in- 
telligible, itself utterly incomprehensible. So far 
as we can arrive at its nature from our preceding 
arguments, the best way to speak of it would be 
this: that part of it which at any time is enkin- 


THE TIMAEUS 193 


dled appears as fire, that which is liquified as 
water, and as earth and air when it receives the 
likeness of these. 

But we must go further in our analysis of this 
matter. We must ask ourselves whether there is 
such a thing also as fire in itself, that is to say 
the Idea of fire, and so of the other things of 
which we are in the habit of predicating absolute 
existence; or are these objects which we perceive 
with the eyes and with the other bodily organs 
alone existent and the only reality, and is there 
nothing in any way existent beyond? Do we 
merely deceive ourselves when we speak of the 
intelligible Idea of anything as really existent, 
since it is no more than a conception of the mind 
or a fashion of speech? Now our dilemma is that 
we cannot leave the present question unjudged 
and undecided, merely affirming positively that 
Ideas do exist, nor can we add another long ex- 
cursus to an argument already too long. If any 
definition should occur to me, broadly inclusive 
yet briefly expressed, it would be most oppor- 
tune for our purpose; and in lieu of such I pro- 
pose my own conviction as follows: If intuition” 
and true opinion are two things different in kind, 
then do the unchangeable Ideas surely exist as 
objects of intuition alone, not perceptible by our 


23 The Greek word is nous. A few lines below the Greek for 
“reason” is logos. 


194 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


senses; but if, as some hold, true opinion differs in 
nothing from intuition, then all we perceive by 
our bodily organs must be regarded as having the 
most real existence. Now we must declare them 
to be of two kinds, since their origin is different 
and their nature unlike. One of them arises in us 
by instruction, the other by persuasion; one is 
always associated with true reason, the other is 
irrational; one is not movable by persuasion, the 
other can be changed by persuasion; of true 
opinion every man may be said to partake, but 
intuition is the portion of the gods and of a 
small number of men. If what I say is correct, 
then we must admit there is first the kind of being 
that exists immutably, unbegotten and imper- 
ishable, neither receiving into itself anything else 
from without nor itself passing into anything 
else, but invisible and altogether imperceptible to 
the senses, that kind of being which we contem- 
plate with the reason. And there is a second 
kind, of the same name as the first and similar 
to it, perceptible, begotten, forever in motion, 
becoming in a certain place and again perishing 
thence, comprehensible by opinion with the aid of 
perception. And there is still a third kind, that 
of everlasting space, which suffers no destruc- 
tion but offers a place for the genesis of all 
things, itself palpable to a certain sort of bastard 
reasoning without true perception, a matter of 


THE TIMAEUS 195 


belief and scarcely that. It is because our gaze 
is turned to this third kind that we say, as if in a 
state of dreaming, that everything which is must 
necessarily be in some place and occupy some 
space, that what is not on the earth or somewhere 
in the heavens is nothing. All these notions and 
others of like sort we transfer to the nature of 
that which truly is and sleeps not, being unable 
because of our dream-state to arouse ourselves to 
the true distinction; for we ought to say that as 
an image has no existence in its own right but is 
merely the moving phantasm of something else, 
so it properly comes to existence in something 
else, clinging to being as it may, if it is to be at 
all; whereas for the confirmation of that which 
really is we have this exact and true reason, that 
so long as there is a final distinction between two 
things one of them cannot come into existence in 
the other in such a way that the same thing shall 
be at once one and two. 

[Here follows an account of the creation and 
properties of the four elements, earth, water, alr, 
and fire: how, by means of the imposition of geo- 
metrical forms upon the unformed and ever rest- 
lessly moving substratum, there is evoked out of 
chaos a material cosmos, ordered and law-abiding 
and beneficent in so far as the goodness of God 
prevails by persuasion over what in its own na- 
ture is intractable and lawless. | 


68E 


69 


196 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Such then was the nature of all these products 
of necessity, and as such the creator of what 
should be fairest and best in the realm of becom- 
ing took them when he begot the self-sufficient 
and most perfect god [i.e. the heaven-bounded 
world], using the causes at work in them as his 
servants, but himself contriving the end of good- 
ness in all things created. Wherefore we must 
discriminate between two kinds of cause, the one 
of necessity, the other divine: and the divine 
cause we must seek in all things, to the end that 
we may possess a happy life so far as our nature 
permits; and the necessary cause for the sake of 
the divine, reflecting that otherwise we cannot 
apprehend by themselves those truths which are 
the object of our serious study, nor grasp them or 
in any other way partake of them.... As then 
we said in the beginning, God, taking these things 
in their disorder, introduced proportions into each 
to the end that so far as possible they might be 
analogous and proportionate in themselves and to 
one another. For hitherto they had had no share 
in these qualities, except by chance, nor did they 
have any claim to the names we now give them, 
viz. fire and water and the rest; but first he 
brought all these things into orderly existence, 
and then out of them composed the universe as 
one creature having within itself all creatures 
mortal and immortal. He himself is the creator 


THE TIMAEUS 197 


of the divine, but the creation of the mortal he 
laid upon his offspring to accomplish. And they, 
in imitation of his act, took from him the im- 
mortal element of the soul, and then fashioned 
about it a mortal body, and gave her all the body 
as a vehicle; and in it they framed also another 
kind of soul, which is mortal, having in itself 
dreadful and compelling passions—pleasure first, 
the greatest incitement to evil, then pains that 
frighten away good, and besides these confidence 
and fear, witless counsellors both, and wrath 
hard to appease, and alluring hope. Having 
mingled these with irrational sensation and with 
love that stops at nothing, they composed as they 
could the mortal soul of man. 


[The remainder of the dialogue deals in more 
detail with the creation of the mortal elements of 
the soul and with the fashioning of the body. It 
contains also a discussion of health and disease, 
and a brief consideration of the rules for an har- 
monious development of this union of soul and 
body which conditions our present life. ] 


625E 


626E 


906A 


CHAPTER VIII 


MYTHOLOGY: THE CREATION 


If we have been right in our interpretation, 
Plato’s philosophy grows out of a sense of dual- 
ism as the central fact of man’s ethical experience. 
As he says in the first book of the Laws, all cities 
are by nature in a state of continual warfare with 
all other cities, and this warfare extends to the 
citizens of the same city, and further to the in- 
ternal life of the individual man. “And that is 
the first and greatest victory when a man is victor 
over himself, as that is the basest and most evil 
condition when a man is defeated by himself.”* 
We are still within the bounds of philosophy when 
the object of this victory is made the Idea of the 
Good, regarded as an entity outside of the soul, 
which plays a dominant part in our moral life as 
the final cause of our being. We pass to theolo- 
gy when, as in the preamble to the Laws, the 

1 This is the Hobbian state of nature in which all men are at 
enmity with one another, carried down to the original “warfare 
within the cave.” With Plato, however, the remedy for this evil 
is not a mechanical transference of rights by contract to a mon- 
arch in whom the will of society is centred, but must come through 


the victory of right over wrong, of the higher self over the lower, 
beginning with the individual man and so extending to society. 


198 


THE CREATION 199 


gods are brought into the warfare as personifica- 
tions, or manipulators it might better be said, of 
the Good: “The heavens are filled with powers of 
good, many in number, and with contrary powers, 
more numerous still than the good; and now we 
say that we are involved with these in a deathless 
battle needing a marvellous guard, and that the 
gods and daemons are our allies.” The further 
step to mythology is taken when the procedure 
of the divine Providence is described in detail 
as preparing for men a judgment seat and as 
guiding men upwards, so far as they suffer them- 
selves to be guided, by the pathway of birth and 
rebirth. In this last stage the essential truth of 
philosophy as a concern of the individual soul, 
is rendered vivid and convincing by clothing it 
in the imaginative garb of fiction—fiction which 
yet may be only a veil, more or less transparent, 
through which we behold the actual events of the 
spirit world; and this aid of the imagination is 
needed just because the dualism of consciousness 
cannot be grasped by the reason, demands indeed 
a certain abatement of that rationalizing tendency 
of the mind which, if left to itself, inevitably seeks 
its satisfaction in one or the other form of mon- 
ism.” 

But there is another, yet similar, use of the 


2 For the all-important réle of reason in conduct and the prac- 
tical affairs of life see Platonism 114 et passim. 


200 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


imagination whereby the problem is considered 
not so much from the side of the individual human 
soul as from that of the gods who take part in the 
eternal warfare of good and evil. How shall we 
present to ourselves the cosmic dualism which 
corresponds, we are bound to believe, with the 
dualism of our consciousness? Here again it is 
of the very nature of the question that it cannot 
be satisfactorily answered by reason, that reason, 
if left to her own devices, will not be content 
with arguing from, but will attempt to explain 
away, the facts which give rise to the question. 
The only practicable method of dealing with the 
matter is by means of mythology; and in the 
Timaeus Plato has appended what may be called 
a cosmic story of creation to his theology, as a 
complement to his psychic myth of metempsy- 
chosis and judgment. 

Now the very structure of the Timaeus is sig- 
nificant. As is usual with him, Plato is careful 
to mark here the divisions of his argument by 
skillfully prepared transitions, and one can see 
at a glance that the dialogue is divided into an in- 
troduction, and then into two main sections ex- 
tending respectively from 27p to 47£ and from 
475 to the end. The subject of both these main 
sections is the creation and ordering of the visible 
universe, but this work is regarded from two dif- 
ferent angles. In the first section the point of 


THE CREATION 201 


view is from above, so to speak; we are looking 
upon creation as a divine effect and as fulfilling 
a divine purpose, and it is noteworthy that both 
matter and soul are considered here under the 
laws and symbols of number and time and mo- 
tion, that is subjectively. In the second section 
the point of view is inverted, and the work of 
creation is seen from below, still as a divine pro- 
duct, but as conditioned by the material out of 
which it is framed and under the objective laws 
and symbols of space and geometrical form. 
Again, each of these two main sections is sub- 
divided. The first subdivision of each section 
(extending respectively from 27p to 42E and 
from 47£ to 694) deals with the activity of God, 
the Demiurge (‘‘maker,” “artificer,” “creator’’), 
while the second subdivision of each section (from 
428 to 47E and from 69a to the end) tells what is 
done by the lesser gods under the command of 
the Demiurge. 

The further articulation of the dialogue—or 
narration it might be called more exactly, since 
the account of creation is all in the mouth of one 
speaker—by prologues, transitions and epilogues 
is interesting as bearing on Plato’s rhetorical art, 
but need not detain us now. ‘The point to observe 
is that the clear dichotomy of form suggests im- 
mediately a corresponding dichotomy of thought 
underlying the whole argument. And this sur- 


27D 


51pD 


202 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


mise is confirmed by the plain statement made 
at the opening of the narration: “In the first 
place, then, in my opinion, we must distinguish 
these two things: What is that which always is 
and has no becoming, and what is that which, 
always becoming, never is? The one, being 
always the same, we comprehend by thought with 
reason; the other, becoming and perishing, never 
really being, we guess at by opinion with unrea- 
soning perception.” Thus, in a couple of sen- 
tences, Plato lays down this summary of his philo- 
sophical dualism as the foundation of his mytho- 
logical superstructure; and he clinches its im- 
portance by repeating the same statement early 
in the second of the main sections. 

In the first main section of the narrative we 
have then, the dualism of knowledge and opinion 
carried on into the objective realm of Ideas and 
phenomena. Many times in the earlier dialogues 
Plato had discussed the relation of these two or- 
ders of existence, asking himself how in essence 
they could remain absolutely distinguished yet 
could be interactive, and he had found no solu- 
tion of the problem: “participation,” “Imitation,” 
and the like were only names for an association 
which it was necessary to assume but which eluded 
all rational explanation. In the Parmenides he 
had ended by denying the right of metaphysics to 
meddle with the matter at all. Now, in the 


THE CREATION 203 


Timaeus, he will cut the Gordian knot with the 
sword of mythology; and by giving the name of 
God to what may be regarded as the dynamic 
element in Ideas, and thus separating God as 
good from the Idea of goodness, will be able to 
speak of phenomena as the handiwork of a crea- 
tor who fashions this visible world after an Ideal 
pattern. So the hint thrown out in the Sophist, 
that there is a certain faculty (or power, dy- 
namis) m Ideas, by which they work down into 
phenomena, is developed into a splendid allegory 
of creation. 

But creation could not be with a Greek philoso- 
pher, as it was to be with the Christians, an evo- 
cation of something out of nothing by a mere 
word of fiat: “‘creation,” indeed, in our sense, is 
rather a misnomer for what is more properly an 
act of fashioning or shaping. ‘To Plato the 
thought of a creator and a thing created implied 
necessarily the presence of a substance out of 
which the object is created. Hence the initial 
dualism of Ideas and phenomena must be com- 
pleted by the addition of a third order of exist- 
ence, to which he gives a variety of names: space, 
the receptacle, the recipient of impressions, the 
nurse or mother, the invisible and shapeless kind, 
necessity. And as being and becoming, Ideas 
and phenomena, are the objective terms of 
knowledge and opinion, so this third order cor- 


247E 


204 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


responds to a faculty of the soul that is neither 
knowledge nor opinion, but a sort of infrarational 
intuition: 

“If what I say is correct, then we must admit 
there is first the kind of being that exists immut- 
ably, unbegotten and imperishable, neither re- 
ceiving into itself anything else from without nor 
itself passing into anything else, but invisible and 
altogether imperceptible to the senses, that kind 
of being which we contemplate with the reason. 
And there is a second kind, of the same name as 
the first and similar to it, perceptible, begotten, 
forever in motion, becoming in a certain place 
and again perishing thence, comprehensible by 
opinion with the aid of perception. And there 
is still a third kind, that of everlasting space, 
which suffers no destruction but offers a place for 
the genesis of all things, itself palpable to a cer- 
tain sort of bastard reasoning without true per- 
ception, a matter of belief and scarcely that.” 


But it is important to note that the real transi- 
tion is not from a dyad to a triad, but from one 
dyad to another, from the contrast, that is to say, 
between being and becoming to the more radical 
contrast between being and what, by virtue of 
its native disorder and unrest and formlessness, 
might be designated as a kind of not-being, or, in 
the terminology of the Sophist, a kind of absolute 
“otherwiseness.” ‘The fundamental conception of 

Timaeus 460 the dialogue is still dualistic: there are two causes, 


THE CREATION 205 


or substances, not three, and the visible world in 
which our life passes is a commingling of these, 
a realm of appearances hovering between the two 
extremes of true and bastard reality. We shall 
quite miss the purpose of Plato’s mythological 
scheme if we refuse to recognize the radical dual- 
ism underlying the superficial dualism of being 
and becoming, or are seduced by rationalism to 
substitute any form of monism for it or to ex- 
plain it away by any Hegelian juggling of terms. 
The conception of the world as born from the 
coming together of the two causes is in no sense 
of the word a rationalizing reconciliation of con- 
traries, but a mythological elaboration of the fact 
of consciousness that in our one person two con- 
trary and irreconcilable natures coexist.” 

The theme of the Timaeus, then, presented 
schematically would appear thus: 


The divine cause The necessary cause 
God Necessity 
The Gods Space 
The Ideal Pattern The receptacle 
The substance to be moulded 


The world of forms and phenomena 
A living creature with soul and body 


3In a later volume we shall see how this same truth of philoso- 
phy forms the basis of the Chalcedonian Definition of the one 
person and two natures of Christ. 


206 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Now examining the higher, or divine, cause a 
little more closely, we first observe that the word 
God (theos), in accordance with the genius of 
the Greek language, has a fluidity of meaning 
which it is difficult for us, with our habit of 
speech, to follow. Our “God,” even more rigidly 
than the Deus of Latin theology, is reserved for 
the one supreme Being, and it would strike us as 
sacrilegious to use it of any other being. But it 
is not so in Greek. The word theos is applied 
quite freely by the Hellenistic Fathers, after the 
manner of the philosophers, to men, and, in gen- 
eral, is equivalent loosely to the divine quality, 
more specifically to the immortal, wherever it oc- 
curs.” Hence we shall not be surprised to find a 
similar fluidity in Plato’s terminology for the 
higher cause. Generically, as distinguished from 
the other extreme, this higher cause is the divine, 
the godlike (to theton). But the divine as a 
cause may be taken in two ways, as the active and 
personal and as the passive and formal, as the 
creator and as the Ideal pattern after which he 
models the work of creation. 

4Dean Inge, in his Christian Mysticism (Appendix C), has 
called attention to this extraordinary fluidity of the word. So, to 
note one or two illustrations not given by him, Origen, In Joan., 
Fragm. 2, says, Exeivovs Oeovs ciev mpos ovs 6 Adyos Tov Aeod 
éyéveto (cf. John x, 35),and Gregory Nazienzen, Theol. Or. 4, says, 
Me& nv torata (6 Xpioros) Beds ev péow Gedy, TOV cwlomevwr, 
diaxpivwy kat diactéAAwy, Tivos ExaoTos TYAS Kal povas aétos. 


THE CREATION 207 


Furthermore, conformably with the free man- 
ner of Greek theology, the personal cause is re- 
garded now as the one God, and now polythe- 
istically as a company of lesser gods. For the 
most part this distinction between God and the 
lesser gods is carried out consistently in the 
Timaeus. ‘To the former is ascribed the initial 
formative act of creation and the fabrication of 
the world as a whole, as a mortal creature fash- 
ioned of soul and body and embracing within it- 
self all individual creatures; whereas to the lesser 
gods is left the task of completing the work by 
the creation and government of these individual 
creatures, including man. But the distinction is 
occasionally forgotten, and particularly in the 
second subdivision of the second main section the 
terms God and gods are employed almost indis- 
criminately where by strict propriety only gods 
should be found. In fact, the distinction between 
God and gods is rather artificial than essential 
with Plato, and has no great significance. His 
chief reason for making it at all would appear to 
be that, by limiting the contact of God to the 
universe regarded as a whole and subject to the 
uniformity of law, he may separate the divine 
goodness more reverently from the irregularities 
which seem to belong rather to the individual 
members of the system; God, he says, repeating ye nee 
the dictum of The Republic, is not responsible | 


208 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


for the evils to be. Yet, after all, these lesser 
artificers merely follow out the commands of their 
Father, and their formal subordination to him is 
not much more than a convenient fiction for the 
fact that we cannot comprehend the relation be- 
tween a perfect creator and an imperfect crea- 
tion.” 

In regard to the other aspect of the divine 
cause, viz. the Ideal pattern (paradeigma) to 
which God looked while framing the phenomenal 
world, opinions have differed: did it have a real 
existence outside of the mind of the creator, or 
was it merely the conception or plan within his 
mind? To Philo, the Platonizing Jew, with his 
thought of God as all in all, only the second of 
these interpretations was possible. “So also,” he 
says, “we must think of God, that, having in mind 
to create the great city of the universe, he first 
conceived its outlines, from which he fashioned an 
intelligible (Ideal) world, and then, with this as 
his pattern, executed the sensible world. As 
therefore the city as it is first outlined in the 
architect occupies no place outside but is an im- 
pression in the soul of the artist, in the same 
manner the world composed of Ideas would have 
no other place than the divine reason which or- 


5In Numenius and the later Pythagorizing philosophers gen- 
erally Plato’s loose attempt to exonerate his supreme deity be- 
comes petrified into a rather mischievous metaphysical system. 


THE CREATION 209 


dered these things; for of his powers (or facul- 
ties, dynameis) what other place would there be, 
capable of admitting and holding, I will not say 
all these powers, but any one of them in its 
purity ?”° 

This conception of Philo’s has at least the merit 
of simplicity and clearness, and it was readily 
assimilated by the Christian interpreters of Plato 
who sought the beginning and source of all things 
in God alone. In such a belief, so long as it re- 
mains consistent with itself, justice and right- 
eousness and beauty should be simply the will of 
God; what he decrees arbitrarily, that is good, 
and Goodness is only another name for God’s 
being. Evil by the same token has no meaning 
except as disobedience to His will.’ But certainly 
such a belief cannot be reconciled with the lan- 
guage of Plato. I have already referred* to the 
passage of the EHuthyphro in which he argues 
that the moral Ideas are distinct from the will 
of God, and in a manner superior to it. And so 
in the Timaeus he is careful not to confuse God, 
who as a personal creator is good and free from 
envy, with the pattern of Goodness which guided 

6 De Opificio Mundi §§4, 5—According to Reitzenstein (Poi- 
mandres 45 et al.) this Philonic conception may be found in the 
Hermetic literature of the age, and may have roots in Egyptian 
mythology. 

7 See chapter ii, note 4. 

8 See ante, page 41. 


210 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


his hand in the work of creation. I do not say 
that such a distinction is without difficulties; for 
if God is good, there is goodness in his mind, 
and it is at least puzzling to understand how 
this subjective goodness is different from Good- 
ness in itself. But this is an embarrassment that 
haunts the whole doctrine of Ideas: it can be an- 
swered only by showing how the contrary theory 
(i.e. that Ideas do not exist separately) is beset 
with more disastrous logical consequences. In 
general the error of Philo may be described as an 
undue subordination of Plato’s philosophy to his 
theology. Echoes of it may be heard among the 
interpreters of today; but the more fashionable 
mode among scholars educated in an idealism of 
Teutonic stamp is rather to subordinate, or vir- 
tually eliminate, Plato’s theology, and to regard 
the word God as merely a loose or popular ex- 
pression for the Idea of the Good. Thus, to take 
the latest, and not the least learned, of the com- 
mentators, Prof. Wilamowitz-Moellendorff holds 
that, despite Plato’s senile concession to the popu- 
lar religion, “his God remained to the end the 
Good, True, Beautiful, which penetrates, moves, 
and vitalizes all, a Godhood which we love, yet 
with no desire that it should love us in return, 
like the Godhood of Spinoza.” And elsewhere, 
in language approaching the dithyrambic, he 
lauds the conclusion of the sixth book of The Re- 


THE CREATION 211 


public as “the moment in which Plato conceived 
the Idea of the Good as his God.” This was “Pla- 
to’s way of bestowing upon mankind a new re- 
ligion through science.” Now I am ready to 
admit that the language of this one passage of 
The Republic, taken alone, lends support to such 
a theory; but even here the Good is set forth 
rather as the teleological than the efficient cause: 
that is to say, it is the purpose of creation, the 
goal towards which all our being and all the 
world’s being should be directed, and hence in a 
way above being, exactly as in the Timaeus the 
Ideal world is the pattern towards which the 
phenomenal world, so far as this is possible, shall 
be shaped and guided. Elsewhere in The Re- 
public the language used of God and the gods is 
of such a character as to make their identification 

9 Platon I, 583, 419, 408—For a full presentation of the view 
held by Wilamowitz-Moellendorff and most of the other modern 
commentators see Wilhelm Biehl’s Idee des Guten bei Platon. An 
excellent brief statement of it will be found in Baron von Hiigel’s 
Mystical Element of Religion II, 311. Both Wilamowitz-Moellen- 
dorff and Baron von Hiigel appeal to Philebus 22c as the strongest 
support of their contention. Plato is there arguing the question 
whether pleasure or intellect is the chief cause of that happy 
life which is our swmmum bonum. Pleasure, which Philebus wor- 
ships as a god, cannot, he says, be such a cause; nor can the 
imperfect human reason be such a cause, though the true and 
divine reason may be. I cannot see that the passage means 
more than this. I may admit, however, while on this subject, that 


my own language in Platonism 201 needs correction, or at least 
modification. 


212 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


with impersonal Ideas almost a wilful perversion 
of Plato’s plain meaning. Rightly understood, 
there is not a word in this dialogue that indicates 
any discrepancy here between his philosophy and 
the mythology of the Phaedrus, the Symposium, 
the Politicus, and the Timaeus.” 

These two modes of interpretation, one ab- 
sorbing Plato’s philosophy in his theology, the 
other absorbing his theology in his philosophy, 
though seemingly contrary, really come together 
in the end.** As they prevail today, they both 
descend by circuitous ways from the Plotinian 
metaphysic of a supreme Unity out of which pro- 
ceeds the Ideal realm of intelligence (nous) and 


10 In the discussion of art in the tenth book of The Republic 
God is said to be the maker of the table itself as it is in nature 
(i.e. the Idea of the table), whereas the table made by the car- 
penter is an imitation of this, while the work of the painter is 
only an imitation of an imitation. Now, in the first place, what- 
ever is meant by this passage, it lends no support to the identi- 
fication of God with Ideas or with any Idea. Nor do I believe 
that Plato really meant to contradict his constant view of ethical 
Ideas as in a way prior logically to God, as for instance in the 
allegory of the Phaedrus (249c: mp0s oio7ep Geos dy Oeios éorwv). 
Plato is leading up to the distinction between the man who actually 
practices virtue and the man who, as play-actor or otherwise, 
merely simulates the practice of virtue. Hence the three spheres 
(Republic 5978): the Ideas themselves of which God is lord or 
overseer, the conduct of human life as modeled upon Ideas, and 
the pretence of such conduct. 

11 They do virtually coalesce in Archer-Hind’s introduction to 
the Timaeus, 


THE CREATION 213 


the intelligible (to noéton). It makes no great 
difference whether the terminology adapted to 
such an abstract Unity assumes a theological or a 
philosophical cast; in either case the practical 
discriminations of philosophy and theology and 
mythology are engulfed in the abyss of the abso- 
lute. I cannot see how the clear distinction be- 
tween the Demiurge and the Ideal pattern in the 
Timaeus can be lost or glossed over without emas- 
culating the religion of Plato. Nor is it any 
withdrawal from this position to admit that a 
certain penumbra of obscurity is left, intention- 
ally perhaps, about both these conceptions. As 
in the preamble to the Laws Plato’s language 
wavered between a philosophical monotheism and 
a recognition of isolated manifestations of the 
divine vaguely grasped by the popular imagina- 
tion, so his terminology varies, with only a little 
less indecision, in the Timaeus. But of the being 
of God or gods, rather of God and gods, per- 
sonal and very real, now withdrawn from mortal 
ken and now haunting some scene of this earth, 
even appearing manifestly as strange visitors 
among men, governing the great world and al- 
ways attentive to human needs,—of this truth 
he exhibits no doubt at all. In the same way 
the nature of the Ideal world cannot be defined; 
but it is there, open to the eyes of the gods, and to. 
the eyes of men if they will see. All things are 


39E 


37c 


29E 
34a 


Laws 715 


214 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


there, not imperfect as they are here, but as they 
would be if freed from the distorting thrust and 
pull of the nether world. 

It might seem that for the moment Plato had 
forgotten his own distinction when he speaks of 
the gods themselves, as having an existence in the 
Ideal world. That is possibly only another way 
of expressing what the divine power would be 
where no limitations were imposed upon its min- 
istry. Rather, I think, it signifies that gods and 
Ideas both belong to that general conception of 
the divine, not as something above both and an- 
nulling their difference, but as a name embracing 
both and answering to the dimness of our under- 
standing. In like manner this world is said more 
precisely to be fashioned after the Ideal pattern; 
yet in looser language Plato may speak of it as an 
image of the eternal gods, or as made to resem- 
ble the good God, or even as itself the god to be 
and a blessed god. Is this laxity of thought? 
Possibly ; but still more I take it to be a reflection 
of the strange paradox that in one sense the only 
knowledge we possess is of the divine, yet of this 
knowledge our reason can give but a faltering 
account. Our highest assurance is conditioned 
on humility. ‘God, as the ancient saying is, hold- 
ing the beginning and the end and the middle 
of all things that are, moves straight on to his 
goal by the seemingly devious ways of nature; 


THE CREATION 215 


and with him follows always Justice, the avenger 
of those that depart from the divine law. ‘To 
this Justice he that will be happy clings, and fol- 
lows with her, humble and chastened.” Such is 
the preface to Plato’s theology, and his myth of 
creation calls for a deeper humility and a more 
chastened spirit. 

At the other extreme from the divine cause 
stands the necessary cause, which, again, like the 
divine, is regarded now as passive and now as 
active. In its passive aspect it receives many 
names, all mere approximations for the dark 
reality. It is called space; but it is not absolute 
emptiness of being which the word signifies when 
taken literally, for it is also likened to the mass 
or substance which is recipient of impressions. It 
is not matter, in so far as by matter we mean a 
body perceptible to our senses and classifiable 
by reason; rather it is the potentiality of matter 
before the elements have come into being. Yet 
again it is not motion, or the principle of mo- 
tion, regarded as a calculable, continuous opera- 
tion, for such motion is the property of soul. 
Itself it is invisible and formless, the receptacle 
and mother of all visible forms, and that out of 
which such forms proceed, the disorder under- 
lying all order. One might think of it as the in- 
verted Idea, known to us by a kind of reluctant 
necessity of reason or bastard intuition. 


53B 


698 


48a 


216 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


In its active capacity, considered not merely 
as a blank recipient of the forms of matter but as 
an ever-restless power imposing certain inevitable 
conditions upon creation, this dark substratum of 
existence, set over against and in a manner op- 
posed to the active element of the divine, is called 
more specifically Necessity (ananké), a necessity 
which, having in itself no purpose or design, be- 
ing in fact the last irreducible resistance to de- 
sign, is virtually synonymous with Chance. 

So we have God and the Ideal pattern at one 
extreme of being, and at the other extreme Ne- 
cessity and the flux of chaos. Between them 
the process of creation would be something like 
this. When the creator took upon himself the 
task of framing a cosmos, he found as it were 
traces and hints of the elements in the abyss of 
chaos, lying in such haphazard state as would be 
expected of things without god. 'They were not 
yet properly the elements with settled laws and 
relations one to the other, nor could they rightly 
be called by specific names, save as for a moment, 
by some accident of mutation, they seemed to rest 
in this or that form. Here, in this potentiality 
of chance, so to speak, was the open door for the 
entrance of design. “For the genesis of this cos- 
mos is a mingled birth, a concurrence of necessity 
and reason; and the beginning was thus: reason 
got control of necessity by persuading it to bring 


THE CREATION 217 


on most things to their best end as they came into 
existence; and so and in such manner, by the act 
of necessity submitting to reasonable persuasion, 
the universe was composed.” In more modern 
terms creation would be described as a process 
of evolution by the interaction of chance and de- 
sign. In the infinite combinations of brute na- 
ture certain forms or approximations to form are 
thrown out, but with no power of persistence or 
cohesion. On these the creator, or the hidden 
Purpose, lays hold, and, so far as the yielding 
nature of necessity permits (that is, in so far as 
chance may be governed), combines them gradu- 
ally into a world of ordered relations. In such 
manner, as the disorder of chance yields to de- 
sign, necessity is transformed into physical law 
as this is known to science and is formulated in 
mathematics; but it is still a necessity rooted in 
chance, and to Plato at least science is never more 
than an approximation to knowledge, dealing 
with approximate laws, a venture into the de- 
lightful realm of probabilities. Plato’s theory of 
creation thus harmonized the two views which, 
separated, were to form the basis respectively of 
Epicurean and Stoics physics, the one attempt- 
ing to account for the nature of things by pure 
chance and the mechanical law (whence derived?) 


12 See the hint thrown out Republic 458p, with James Adam’s 
note, and compare Timaeus 69a, 


56c 


59c 


218 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


of probability, the other seeing everywhere only 
design and no chance at all in the universe. 

So interpreted, Plato is an optimist of a sort, 
but certainly not an optimist as the word is 
ascribed to the philosophy of Leibnitz. The 
point is of some importance in its ethical bear- 
ing. In the Continuation of the Dialogue of 
Laurentius Valla and in the Controversy with 
Bayle, which form sections of the Theodicy, 
Leibnitz tells in an allegory how a certain Theo- 
dore is carried by the goddess of wisdom to the 
Palace of Destinies, where he beholds as it were 
piled up in a pyramid samples of all conceivable 
worlds, at the apex the best possible world and 
from this extending downwards in infinite series 
ever less perfect worlds. These are the Ideas on 
which the creator looked, and from which in his 
infinite goodness and power he selected the point 
of the pyramid as the model of the phenomenal 
world to be created. To those, then, who ask 
why there is evil in a universe so created by an 
omnipotent God in the likeness of a perfect pat- 
tern, the reply is that the best choice is not always 
that which avoids evil, since it may be that the 
evil brings with it a greater good. We know 
from mathematics and otherwise that an imper- 
fection in the part may be required for a greater 
perfection in the whole. St. Augustine has said 
a hundred times that God permitted evil in order 


THE CREATION 219 


to draw from it a greater good; and Thomas 
Aquinas also declares that the permission of evil 
tends to the good of the universe. So the fall of 
Adam was. a felix culpa, a happy and fortunate 
sin, since thereby the Incarnation has brought 
to mankind a higher blessing than otherwise they 
could have enjoyed. 

That is optimism properly so called; it is the 
contrary of everything that Plato meant to con- 
vey in the myth of the Timaeus. By his “neces- 
sary cause” Plato did not mean that evil was the 
necessary condition or cause of good, but that it 
was simply evil, actual and inexplicable, and so, 
as one might say, necessary. In the Ideal world 
there is no imperfection, no “best possible,” but 
absolute good; and if evil and imperfection are 
discovered in the copy, as indeed they are not 
discovered but thrust upon our gaze, that is be- 
cause there is a something intrinsically evil, a 
dark and undiscoverable power, which breaks the 
perfect execution of the design. Plato was not 
trying to justify God by minimizing, or virtually 
denying, evil in the world, but was dressing a 
fact in the symbols of the imagination, Our 
world is not simply the best possible, but the best 
possible under the given conditions. 

The physical details of this phenomenal world, 
so composed, belong rather to science than to re- 
ligion, and I have omitted most of them in my 


69c 


et al. 


726 


69e ff. 


35a 
36c 
374A 


220 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


translation of the Timaeus. But what of soul, 
and what is its place in the scheme? This is a 
question vital to Plato’s religion, but avowedly 
difficult to answer. 

In the first place we observe a distinction be- 
tween the immortal soul and the mortal, or be- 
tween the immortal and the mortal parts of the 
soul, which points at once to a psychic dualism 
corresponding to the cosmic dualism of the myth. 
As it is said in the little sermon on the soul in 
the preamble to the Laws: “To every man his all 
is dual.” But this simple dichotomy is compli- 
cated by another division of the soul, following 
the psychology of The Republic, into three facul- 
ties, or modes of activity, viz. reason (nous), the 
emotions (to thymoeides), and the concupiscence 
(to epithymétikon) ; and it is not clear at a glance 
how these two divisions, the dual and the tripar- 
tite, are to be reconciled. The first adjustment 
would be to reckon the two lower faculties to- 
gether as the mortal part, and to separate reason 
from them as the immortal; and this arrangement 
is correct in so far as the emotional and concu- 
piscent faculties certainly belong to what is mor- 
tal in the soul. But with reason the problem is 
not so simple. 'To begin with, reason has a double 
function, as it is concerned with both the Same 
and the Other, that is to say with what is per- 
manent and invariable, and with what is always 


THE CREATION 221 


changing and never abiding. In other words 
there is a division within reason corresponding to 
the distinction between the knowledge of things 
that are (Ideas) and the opinion of things that 
seem (phenomena) which made the starting point 
of the whole argument of the dialogue, and which 
indeed runs like a guiding thread through all of 
Plato’s philosophy. Now as possessing know- 
ledge and being akin to the immutable objects of 
eternity reason is manifestly eternal; and in this 
belief we are confirmed by the statement that then 
only shall the immortal part of a man be freed 
from the hazards of an ever-changing and per- 
turbed existence and be restored to its celestial 
home, when it has been schooled by philosophy to 
move in harmony with the unvarying revolutions 
of the Same as these are seen in the heavens and 
as they may be found by searching in the soul 
itself. As the organ of opinion, on the other 
hand, reason has a share in physical life and is, 
like the things with which it deals, mortal. The 
problem of the reason thus falls back at last on the 
obscure paradox of the one and the many as seen 
in the “philosophy of the soul.” 

Two observations may be added to avoid mis- 
understanding. First, when such words as di- 
vision and dichotomy are used it does not mean 
that one part of the soul can be cut from the 
other as we can sever the limbs of the body. Sec- 


308 


34c 


222 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ondly, because opinion is concerned with what is 
only ephemerally stable (if the oxymoron may 
be allowed), it does not follow that such use of 
the reason is necessarily erroneous or negligible. 
On the contrary Plato distinguishes carefully be- 
tween true opinion which corresponds with facts 
and false opinion which misjudges facts; and he 
makes it clear that our conduct in detail, under 
any given set of circumstances, must be guided by 
the formation of true opinion and by the right 
use of the practical reason. 

Such is the nature of soul. As for its origin, 
we are told that, as all things reasonable are 
fairer than things without reason and as reason 
cannot be present without soul, therefore God 
set reason in soul, and soul in body, and so by his 
providence fashioned the world as best it might 
be. Now by the statement that reason cannot 
exist without soul Plato would seem to mean 
that reason is a part of soul, or, rather, that reason 
is a name for soul in its purity. He does not 
say, be it noted, that soul cannot exist without 
body, and he does say that soul is in reality prior 
(in dignity rather than in time) to body. ‘Thus 
the world is made a living creature, with soul and 
reason, with a rational soul that is, which pos- 
sesses consciousness and is sufficient to itself in 
its own love and knowledge. 

To the question whether God himself is a soul 


THE CREATION 223 


Plato in the Timaeus gives no direct answer, but 
there can be no doubt as to his intention. In the 
first place, emphatically, God is not identical with 
the world-soul; there is no trace anywhere in 
Plato’s works of pantheism or a pantheistic im- 
manence, nor any place for them in his philoso- 
phy. And further, God has no body; he is not 
a composite (synamphoteron), a living creature 
such as the world is and as man is to be. But if 
the Timaeus thus separates God from the world 
and leaves him without a body, it does not de- 
prive him of the attributes of soul; to have done 
so would have been to run counter to the main 
argument for the existence of God as we have 
read it in the Laws, not to mention other passages 
to the same import. The Timaeus does in fact 
represent him as morally affected (as good, with- 
out envy, etc.), as abiding in his own charac- 
ter, as going about his work with intelligence, 
and making calculations, as possessing reason— 
rather, as a soul in the form of pure reason, creat- 
ing, governing, guiding. All these of course are 
mythological expressions, accommodations to our 
groping approach to a Being beyond our com- 
prehension—“the maker and father is hard to find 
out and cannot be told to all men’”—but I think 
that on the whole Plato took them rather simply, 
and in his language generally there is a notable 
absence of such vague transcendentalism as, when 


28c 


27A 


41p 


69c 


224 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


examined, reduces God to an empty word. His 
dualism saved him from the metaphysical agony 
that sometimes troubles a monistic theology.* 

The lesser gods and the world-soul are the cre- 
ation, or, in accordance with a distinction read 
by later theologians into the phrase “maker and 
father,” the offspring of the Demiurge. In the 
fashioning of the souls of men there is a double 
process. First, it is said, the Demiurge, taking 
what remained of the soul-stuff, no longer pure 
but mixed with runnings of the second and third 
order, flawed, that is, as the words seem to imply, 
by the potentiality of faculties of a lower nature, 
—taking and mingling this, the Demiurge now 
creates individual souls equal in number to the 
stars, wherein, riding for a season as in celestial 
chariots, they discern the laws of being and of 
destiny. With these first principles, or intuitions, 
planted in them, the souls are turned over to the 
lesser gods for further fashioning and guidance. 
From their hands is derived the mortal element 
of the soul, “having in itself dreadful and com- 
pelling passions—pleasure first, the greatest in- 
citement to evil, then pains that frighten away 

13 Plutarch, De Defectu Orac. 10: Ot pév ovdevds dmAG@s Tov 
Gedv of 8 Smod te wavtwv aitiov moodvvTEes GoTOXOVGL TOD peETpioV 
Kal mpémovTos, €U pev ovv A€yovar Kal of A€yovTes, tt IlAaTwv 7d 
Tais yevvwpevars TOLOTHTW UroKEeimevoy OTOLXELoOv eLevpwry, O VV 
DAnv Kai Piow Kadrovow, TOAAGY arndrdAake Kal peydrAwy amropLav 
Tovs pirocogors. 


THE CREATION 225 


good, and besides these confidence and fear, wit- 
less counsellors both, and wrath hard to appease, 
and alluring hope. Having mingled these with 
irrational sensation and with love that stops at 
nothing, they composed as they could the mortal 
soul of man.” 

For a temporal habitation and vehicle of this 
composite soul the body is framed, and by a 
quaint contrivance, taken by Plato apparently 
with somewhat naive simplicity, the faculties 
are kept separate by lodging reason in the head, 
the emotions in the thorax, and concupiscence in 
the abdomen. So men start on their mortal 
career and play their diverse parts, passing from 
birth to birth, and to higher and lower forms of 
existence according as they obey the laws im- 
planted in them by the Demiurge or give way to 
the baser instincts of their nature. It is not that 
pleasure and pain, or the desires and emotions 
connected with them, are totally depraved in 
themselves—such an assumption would make 
nonsense of all the introductory books of the 
Laws—but they contain the principle of evil in 
so far as they are radically unlimited, belonging 
by nature to what in itself is without measure 
and tends by inertia to endless expansion. 
Hence, left to themselves, they run to evil, where- 
as under control they may become good, and the 
art of life lies in the governing of pleasure and 


69p ff 


226 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


pain by a law exterior to them, in a man’s becom- 
ing master of himself, or better than himself 
(kreitt6n heautow) . 

What in this Platonic myth, one asks, is the 
precise relation of soul to body, especially as re- 
gards the origin of evil—a question of large prac- 
tical consequences, to which unfortunately no un- 
equivocal answer can be given. That in some 
way there is a kinship between the principle of 
evil in the soul and that principle of disorder in 
the primordial substance which is never entirely 
eliminated from the material world, so much is 
clear. Both belong to what is intrinsically limit- 
less, to the flux, to the infinite as the Greeks un- 
derstood that word: both are a part of the dark 
necessity of existence which cannot be argued 
away. By reason of this kinship, or similarity, 
it is easy to transfer the terms of one to the other; 
and from this transference it is but a step to a 
form of dualism which congregates all evil upon 
the body and regards psychic evil as a conse- 
quence merely of the soul’s association with the 
flesh. Hence the crude pessimism and asceticism 
which arose at an early date in Hellenistic phi- 
losophy and were not always rigidly excluded 
from Christianity. Now undoubtedly in the 
Timaeus Plato does occasionally speak as if the 
body, with its inherent residue of rebellious dis- 
order, were something more than kin to psychical 


THE CREATION 227 


disorder, as, for example, in the passage where 
he says that the motions of the elements, falling 
upon the body like tempestuous winds, set up a 
disturbance which reaches to the soul and breaks 
the harmony of its pristine revolutions. And un- 
doubtedly such a view of the relation of body and 
soul finds apparent support in certain of the ear- 
lier dialogues. But on the other hand there is 
the categorical statement of The Republic, never 
to be forgotten, that a man’s soul contains within 
itself its own principles of good and evil, distinct 
from the good and evil of the body. And so, in 
the Timaeus, the individual soul as it comes from 
the hand of the Demiurge, and before any contact 
with the phenomenal world of time, bears the po- 
tential germ of evil, which becomes actual and 
active in those emotions and desires which are 
the soul’s mortal part, and for which the body is 
fashioned. Maximus of Tyre would seem to be 
right in finding in Platonism two sources of evil, 
similar and confluent, but not identical, one in 
the soul itself, the other in the primordial activity 
of the substance out of which matter is evolved.“ 

It is tempting to carry this analogy a step fur- 
ther, and to attribute to the necessary cause a soul 

14 Philosophoumena xli, 48: Tis ov 9 THs atacBaXtins airia ; 
ovpavod Kal yys Svoiv éoriaw tiv pey apoipov HynTéov KaKOv, THY 
Se ef dudoty eripenrypevny: 7) Ta pev dyaba exipputa ex THs éré- 
pas, Ta O€ Kaka €€ aitopvots poxOypias dvicratar. Surry Se 
aitn, 4 mev tAns aos, 7 Se Wx7s eSovaia. 


43c 
44a 


609B 


896D 


228 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


of evil balancing the soul of good in the divine 
cause. Such in fact was the theory of Plutarch,” 
who saw in the lifeless, inert “recipient” the 
primordial substance of matter, and to the active 
aspect of the cause (the disorderly moving Ne- 
cessity, ataktos ananké) gave the properties of 
soul. And for this interpretation of the cosmic 
myth he found support in Plato’s passing refer- 
ence in the Laws to the evil-doing soul of the 
heavens and in the clear statement that all mo- 
tion goes back to soul as the self-moved mover. 
The cosmic causes and their product would thus 
fall into a complete parallelism of soul and sub- 
stance, which can be neatly schematized: 


The divine cause Creation The necessary cause 


(a et Ga a ee ae Ee 
Vee the soul of | The soul of the world | Necessity, the soul 


good and its creatures of evil 
§ The Ideal Material phenomena The primordial 
Ul pattern substance 


The analogy is certainly seductive, and the 
authority of Plutarch, one of the greatest if not 
quite the greatest of all Platonists, ancient or 
modern, should not lightly be set aside; yet I am 
inclined to think that we are bound to waive both 
the analogy and the authority and to limit the ex- 
tension of soul to God and the animate world. 
The isolated hint of the Laws, however it be in- 
terpreted, need not be carried into the mythology 


15 De Animae Procreatione §§6, 7. 


THE CREATION 229 


of the Timaeus; and the ascription of self-motion 
to soul alone can be explained as meaning con- 
scious and consecutive motion, or motion with a 
purpose (telos). On the other hand the account 
of the soul’s creation can scarcely be forced into 
the Plutarchian scheme; and there is, I believe, not 
a word in the Timaeus which justifies a separa- 
tion of the active and passive aspects of the neces- 
sary cause (this distinction of active and passive 
itself being in fact merely inferential) in a man- 
ner corresponding to the separation of God and 
Ideas in the divine cause. Though in its outer 
aspect the evil underlying the natural world is 
analogous to sin in the soul, each being a principle 
of disorder and inert expansiveness, yet in an- 
other sense the two are diverse, even contrary, in 
their working. The effect of natural evil is to 
break down the organized world into a kind of 
chaotic sea of indifference; it is the enemy of dis- 
tinction and segregation. Psychical evil on the 
other hand has just the opposite tendency. As 
Plato shows in the argument for immortality in 
the tenth book of The Republic, its source is not 
general but particular, and its effect is rather to 
sharpen the personal isolation of the soul and to 
intensify the principle of individualization. 

The attempt to force the myth of the Timaeus 
into the Procrustean bed of logic has thus given 
rise to two incompatible theories: one which 


87D 


89D 


230 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


would find a complete parallelism of soul and 
body, each with its own principle of good and 
evil; another which would result in a sharp hos- 
tility of soul and body, by making soul the source 
of good and body the source of evil. The former 
theory was adopted by Plutarch, the latter went 
over into various schools of pessimism and as- 
ceticism. Of the two the parallelism of Plutarch 
is certainly closer to the general trend of Plato’s 
thought than the other. It harmonizes more 
readily with the thoroughly Grecian element in 
Plato’s views of education, and more particularly 
with such passages of the Timaeus itself as that 
which sets the law of healthy living in a due bal- 
ance and adjustment of the activities of body and 
soul; Plato never learnt asceticism from his mas- 
ter Socrates, nor did he ever develop it for him- 
self. Yet, if nearer to the truth, the Plutarchian 
theory is not quite the truth. It does not suf- 
ficiently recognize the soul as paidagégos, or dis- 
ciplinarian leader in the partnership (though in 
his practical ethics Plutarch was clear enough on 
this point) ; nor does it quite adequately keep hold 
of the fact that the body, with its roots in the 
dark chaos of necessity, is the instrument, if not 
ultimately the cause, of psychical evil, and that 
the way of salvation is strangely connected with 
a release from the body’s imperative needs and 
impulses. 


THE CREATION 231 


cr oe 


So the matter stands. I fear we must simply 
admit that no perfectly consistent theory of body 
and soul in their relation to evil can be drawn 
from Plato’s works. It is fair and safe to add 
that no other teacher of philosophy or religion 
has ever succeeded in solving this importunate 
problem without doing violence in one direction 
or another to the apparent facts of our moral ex- 
perience. For a right understanding of the 
Timaeus the essential point after all is this, that 
Plato’s myth is true to the dualism of his phi- 
losophy, and, starting with evil as a given neces- 
sity, virtually admits the incomprehensibility of 
its origin. 


CHAPTER IX 


MYTHOLOGY: THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 


The Timaeus may be regarded as an elaborate 
myth in which the imagination is allowed to deal 
in its own way with certain obscure facts of 
human experience. It displays the réle of evil 
in this world of ours, starting with the passions 
of the soul, in themselves unregulated and end- 
lessly expansive, and with a similar power of un- 
rest in the background of nature. How, one 
asks, does this mythical drama agree with Plato’s 
constant ethical doctrine that evil is somehow 
identical with ignorance and that no man sins, or 
errs, willingly ? 

Before attempting a solution of this problem it 
may be well to note the position of the various 
schools that attacked the question of evil in Hel- 
lenistic times, and that are to be treated more 
fully in later volumes of this series. For in truth 
we come here to a matter which is at once the 
source and consternation of most human thinking. 
“The real riddle of existence,’ as Mansel says, 
“the problem which confounds all philosophy,— 
aye, and all religion, too, so far as religion is a 
thing of man’s reason,—is the fact that evil exists 

232 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 233 


at all.”’* Mansel is right, I think, in attributing 
the rout of philosophy—though I should have 
preferred to say metaphysics, drawing here the _ 
line between the legitimate and the illegitimate — 
use of the reason—and of rationalizing theology 
to the endeavour to explain rationally what can- 
not be so explained; but I am right also, I trust, 
in holding that the virtue of Platonism, when it 
is true to itself, is in its rejection of metaphysics 
at just this point. This difference of method be- 
tween Platonism and the various Hellenistic 
schools can be seen by a glance at the following 
diagram, with the notes appended. The problem 
of evil has two aspects, as it is related to the cos- 
mos and to the individual. Under each of these 
relations the various schools of thought would 
naturally fall into two groups: those which cate- 
gorically deny the existence of evil, and those 
which, theoretically at least, admit its reality. 
Among those which admit the reality of evil two 
questions would then arise: the question of origin, 
or how evil comes to be, and the question of re- 
sponsibility. — 


1 Bampton Lectures 145. 


THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


(234 


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uorafor oys0oun) 2° -31 JO 
uorsonb Jo souvprloae uvoanoidy ,'g} worsoned 
[EM 904f URIISIIYD ,"p 


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UISITenp IIysouL) -"q 
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uoNnuUIUIp pure uoneUuRUa dtU0ye[doaN - 
xopeied o103¢ ,; 


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sOouIsOD 
ayy Uy 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 235 


NOTES ON DIAGRAM 


(a!) By the Stoic paradox is meant the theory 
which regards the imperfections of the parts of a sys- 
tem as necessary for the perfection of the whole as a 
closed and unitary system. Such a use of the word 
“necessary” is the very opposite of Plato’s, implying 
as it does not that evil is necessarily, i.e. inexplicably, 
in the world, but that as a necessary factor of good it 
is essentially not evil. Chrysippus summarizes the 
Stoic theory in a few sentences quoted by Aulus Gellius: 
“Nothing is more utterly blind‘and stupid than those 
who think that goods could exist if there were not also 
evils in the world. For as goods are the contrary of 
evils, it is necessary ‘that both should exist together, 
each supporting the other by a kind of mutual resis- 
tance.”? To which may be added Plutarch’s comment 
on a still bolder statement of the same paradox: “ ‘It 
is neither possible,’ says Chrysippus, ‘nor expedient 
altogether to remove evil.’ This is not the place to con- 
sider whether it is inexpedient to remove lawlessness 
and injustice and folly; but you yourself, Chrysippus, 
are at strife with reason and God, in so far as by your 
philosophizing you are doing what you can to annihilate 
evil which it is inexpedient to annihilate.”” 

2 Noctes Ambros. VI, i. An illegitimate expansion of Theaetetus 
1764. Plato says, drevavtiov ydp te TO dyab@ del elvar dvdyxn, 
but he would have recoiled from the deduction, mutuo adverso 
quaeque fulta nisu. 

3De Stoicorum Repugn. §36.—Professor Santayana, in his 
Character and Opinion in the United States pp. 105 ff, has a 


masterly analysis and refutation of Royce’s attempt to revive the 
old Stoic paradox. 


236 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


(a?) Neoplatonism undertakes to account for evil 
negatively by means of successive emanations, or expan- 
sions, from a metaphysical Unity of an extreme type. 
Theoretically, evil, as mere distance from, or diminution 
of, Being, per se does not exist, is not-being. But with 
this abstract theory is jumbled, rather clumsily, the 
Stoic paradox. 

(b*8") Epicureanism admits the existence of physical 
evil, but by carrying everything back to blind chance as 
the one ultimate cause really eliminates the moral dis- 
tinction between evil and good. There can be no ques- 
tion of responsibility in such a doctrine. 

(b?B*) Gnostics and Manicheans in general account 
for evil by separating the Demiurge, or Creator, him- 
self more or less evil, from the supreme God of good- 
ness. Their theories are involved in a grotesque mythol- 
ogy which sounds often like a travesty of Platonism. 
The Demiurge is responsible, God is not. 

(b°8*) Christians start with the monistic assump- 
tion of an absolute, omnipotent Deity who creates the 
world by fiat out of nothing. The obvious dilemma 
which confronts such a theory is thus put by Lactan- 
tius into the mouth of an Epicurean atheist: “God, he 
says, either wills to abolish evils and is not able, or is 
able and does not will; or He neither wills nor is able; or 
He both wills and is able. If He wills and is not able, 
He is feeble; which cannot be said of God. If He is 
able and does not will, He is malicious; which also is 
foreign to God. If He neither wills nor is able, He 
is both malicious and feeble; and so is not God. If He 
wills and is able, whence then are evils, or why does He 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 237 


not abolish them?” To escape this dilemma and to 
relieve God of responsibility, evil is held to be a self- 
origining intrusion into what was created good. On 
this ground two main lines of apology are followed. 
One is akin to the Stoic paradox, as stated thus by 
Lactantius: ‘And for this reason He does not abolish 
evils because, as I have explained, He has bestowed wis- 
dom also at the same time, and there is more of good and 
happiness in wisdom than of suffering in evils. More- 
over wisdom makes us to know God and through that 
knowledge to attain immortality; which is the highest 
good. Therefore unless we first acquired the knowledge 
of evil, we could not have acquired the knowledge of 
good.”* The other line of apology is content to rest 
in a distinction between what God positively wills and 
what He merely permits as extraneous to His purpose. 
Thus Clement of Alexandria: “But it is true that noth- 
ing happens without the will of the Lord of all. It 
remains to say summarily that such things [evils] hap- 
pen without the prevention of God, for such a belief 
alone saves both the Providence and the goodness of 
God.” 

(ct) In respect to evil in the soul the Stoics are 
radically inconsistent. Their fatalistic monism leaves 
no choice in the human will, yet in some way men do 
choose between a state of mind in harmony with the 
sum of things and a spirit of individual rebellion or 
reluctance which has for them all the consequences of 
evil. 

4De Ira 13—Compare with this Thomas Aquinas, Summa I, 


xlvii, 2. 
5 Stromata IV, xii, 86. 


238 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


(c?) Here the Neoplatonists also are inconsistent. 
There is no positive evil, yet their ethic is based on a 
system of asceticism and of flight from a world the very 
touch of which is contamination to the soul. 

(d's') Epicurus seems to derive the notion of free will 
from a fortuitous deflection in the motion of the atoms. 
But the transition from impersonal chance to personal 
choice is not easily conceivable. There is no real sense 
of moral evil in his ethics any more than in his physics, 
although he has much to say about the method of escape 
from pain and fear. 

(d°s*) Gnostics and Manicheans involve the fate of 
man in their cosmic theology. In conformity with their 
conception of a good God and a more or less evil god 
they commonly divide mankind into a class whose nature 
is essentially good and a class whose nature is essentially 
evil. Such a dissociation of the “two natures” removes 
the question of responsibility from ethics. 

(d*°8*) Christians place the origin of evil primarily 
in the will of man or of some angelic being, and regard 
cosmic evil as secondary to this. Sin and evil come into 
the world by Adam, or through Adam by Satan, who 
both were created free and deliberately chose evil. The 
dilemma as stated above (b*8*) thus falls here a fortiori. 
It is hard to find a plausible reply to the question why a 
spirit, created without inclination to evil, should with 
full knowledge of the consequences choose evil. I omit, 
as abhorrent to reason and conscience, the Calvinistic 
admission that God for His good pleasure willed the evil 
choice made by man.° 


6I am dealing here with the monism of Christian theology. 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 239 


Now, running the eye again over this scheme, 
we see that, apart from the Gnostics and the 
Manicheans who may be left out of the account 
for the present, all these non-Platonic systems 
are monistic, and that their monism leads to one 
of two consequences: either they frankly deny 
the existence of evil, or they admit its existence 
but then straightway are compelled so to connect 
it with the supreme cause as virtually to explain 
it away. In either case the result, logically if 
not practically, is that evil becomes merely rela- 
tive and ceases to be regarded as a positive reality 
in the world and in the soul of man. And I would 
ask my reader not to dismiss these logical difficul- 
ties as “academic,” a matter of words only; they 
are far from that. Perhaps the most insidious 
ally of sin and suffering in the world has been 
that theory of conduct which is expressed in such 
popular maxims as these: The end justifies the 
means, Do evil that good may arise, Let him 
sow his wild oats, Knowledge of goodness comes 
through experience of evil, The worst sinner is 
the best preacher. Wars and _ persecutions, 
hideous wide-sweeping devastations, have had 
their root in just these beliefs; and not public 
calamities only, but the corruptions of art, the 


There is another whole aspect of Christian philosophy, presented 
by the Incarnation, which we shall have occasion to consider else- 
where. 


240 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


tragedies of private life, the daily infractions of 
happiness, have their palliation if not their source 
in the same paltering with the simple truth that, 
so far as we can know or guess, evil is eternally 
evil and good eternally good. It all goes back 
to, and finds confirmation in, a Jesuitical lie 
which explains away evil for the greater glory of 
God. A philosophy that makes the imperfection 
of the part necessary for the perfection of the 
whole, or a theology that defends the permission 
of evil in the world as an instrument of greater 
good through salvation, cannot be severed from 
the public adoption of vicious means for the ad- 
vancement of religion or State, or from the pri- 
vate indulgence in wickedness or loose conduct as 
a foundation of character and success. Philoso- 
phy is the whole of life. The condemnation of 
such perversions does not mean, of course, that 
good cannot be wrung out of evil, or that we may 
not learn wisdom from our mistakes; but it does 
mean emphatically that the better way and the 
higher wisdom and the greater strength and the 
purer virtue lie in the avoidance, so far as that is 
humanly possible, of evil and error from the be- 
ginning: 
“Happier, had it sufficed him to have known 
Good by itself, and Evil not at all.”7 


7 Paradise Lost xi, 88. 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 241 


All monistic theorizing on the ultimate origin 
of evil turns inevitably to an apology for evil; 
although it is fair to add that the wiser doctors of 
Christianity have permitted their deep abhor- 
rence of sin to thrust itself athwart their meta- 
physics before the last fatal step was taken. A 
few of them have perceived the religious con- 
junction of scepticism (i.e. the admission of our 
ignorance of ultimate causes) and spiritual af- 
firmation (i.e. our immediate knowledge of the 
radical distinction between good and evil) as 
clearly as ever Socrates did, and thus have main- 
tained what may be called a secret dualism as 
Plato maintained it openly. One preacher of 
recent years has given noble expression to this 
truth in words that are at once Platonic in con- 
ception and Christian in intensity of feeling: 
“His [Martineau’s] general conclusion is that 
moral evil is not the instrument, but the enemy of 
God; and if we still ask, ‘Whence this foe? no 
answer can be given. ‘All the ingenuities of logic 
and of language leave it a mystery still: and it is 
better to stand within the darkness in the quie- 
tude of faith, than vainly to search for its margin 
in the restlessness of knowledge.’ ”* 


8 Life of James Martineau, by J. Drummond, I, 103.—Prof. 
Dickinson S. Miller has an excellent article in the first issue of 
the American Theological Review, on the practical danger of seek- 
ing solutions for the problem of evil. But I cannot avoid the 
suspicion that this very danger is proved by some of the con- 
clusions of his article in the following issue of the magazine. 


242 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Now what Christianity obtained by a certain 
inconsistency is the consistent basis of Plato’s 
philosophy. His dualism is virtually tantamount 
to a refusal to deal with the origin of evil meta- 
physically, recognizing the question as rationally 
insoluble and not making for edification. His 
mythology leaves evil in the cosmos as a mys- 
terious unaccountable fact, for which no person 
(that is, no conscious will like our own) is re- 
sponsible. It leaves room for a personal creat- 
ing God, who is good but not omnipotent in the 
Christian or metaphysical sense. So in his treat- 
ment of psychical evil Plato avoids the abyss of 
monism by distinguishing between the immortal 
and the mortal elements of the soul, and by the 
myth of transmigration, which regards the state 
of any individual soul now as dependent upon its 
conduct in a past life, and that state on a still 
previous existence. But along with this meta- 
physical continence it is a fact that the Dialogues 
dwell largely on the psychological aspects of the 
problem—his whole philosophy is predominantly 
ethical—and our present task is to see how the 
metaphysical continence of his mythology can be 
harmonized with his psychological study of 
causes. 

Socrates, it is well known, identified virtue 
with knowledge, and Plato took over this dogma 
as the corner stone of his ethical psychology. An- 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 243 


other favourite belief of Socrates, apparently, 
was that no man sinned, or erred, willingly; and 
this dogma also was accepted by his pupil without 
question. Hence we have as our starting pomt 
these two theses, the identification of evil with 
ignorance and the involuntariness of evil, which 
are succinctly joined together in a statement of 
the Sophist: ‘We know that no soul is volun- 
tarily ignorant of anything.” Now what exactly 
does Plato mean by this involuntary ignorance 
that lies behind all evil-doing? 

In the discussion in the Laws of the Socratic 
sentence that “all evil men in all things are evil 
unwillingly,” Plato considers two aspects of 
willingness: first, the intention to do an injury, 
and secondly, the intention to act unjustly; and 
then makes a like division of injustice (here, as 
commonly, a general term for evil-doing) into, 
first, an intentional act of injury, and, secondly, 
a voluntary state of injustice in the mind of the 
doer. And in each of these divisions he admits 
the existence of the first and denies the existence 
of the second. That is to say, he admits, natur- 
ally, that men do intentionally injure others and 
that such injuries may be unjust in fact, but he 
refuses to admit that, in so acting, men have the 
will to be unjust, or that their acts are voluntar- 
ily, from their own point of view, unjust.’ He 

9The same position is held in Euthyphro 8c. 


228c 


860p ff. 


226c ff. 


244 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


then proceeds to analyse the motives of these acts 
of injury, which may be unjust in fact, under 
three heads: (1) anger or fear, as a vice of the 
emotional faculty, or the thymoeides; (2) the 
desire of pleasure, as a vice of concupiscence, or 
the epithymétikon; (8) ignorance, as a vice of 
the reason. The last motive he subdivides into a 
simple ignorance (more properly agnota) of the 
facts of the case, and a double, or deeper, ignor- 
ance (more properly amathia) in the very soul 
of the man, being of the nature of that first false- 
hood (préton pseudos) which Plato often de- 
scribes as a state of not knowing what one knows 
and what one does not know. 

The same triple division is carried through the 
elaborate metaphor, in the Sophist, of the purga- 
tion of evil, the ramifications of which can best be 
presented by a diagram (p. 245). 

The purpose of this comparison is to show how 
evil in the soul is to be cured by a sort of purga- 
tion (as one branch of the more general art of 
separation or dividing-out) similar to that em- 
ployed in healing corruption in the body. For 
the body there are two arts: medicine, which 
purges away disease as a surfeit causing a dis- 
cord among the humours of the body, and gym- 
nastic, which removes a native deformity, or dis- 
proportion, of the body itself. Correspondingly, 
for remedying vice in the soul, we employ punish- 


245 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 


MOU 30U 
op 9m yey 
MOUY 9A 
mWO0IjOR Suryuryy 
snosuoii9 ‘(n1yjDuUD) 
sasneo dOURIOUSI 
yor 
‘uona10d 
-oidsiqy 
8j0BJ jo 
[ 0uvIOUSI 


ag 


Aytur0yap—Apoq oy} 


901A 


Pioosip 
Ree | 


asvasIp—Apoq oy} 


soyouaya 
o17B10 
-0S oy} Aq 


WOTJOTAUOD uorljytuowpe 


SU aoe 


[ Tay Sty | 


uoryona4sul 


}} 


[nos 9y4 
sodUdI0S sjuoulaya 
| [ pue sjie Surqinystp 
to sand 
-WI YO Sur 
-jeredos 
jO Jae 94} 
‘uoryesing 


orysvum ss | 


[nos 94} 


quowystund 
sUIOIpour 


246 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ment as a medicine to drive out a temporary dis- 
cord of the faculties, and instruction as a gym- 
nastic to remove that inner deformity for which 
another name is ignorance. Further, a study of 
the text will show that under the sort of psychic- 
al disease that is to be cured by punishment Plato 
included the first two forms of injustice described 
in the Laws as proceeding from anger or fear 
and from the desire of pleasure, when these swell 
beyond the control of reason and create a state of 
discord or faction in the soul. And, again, as in 
the Laws, the evil of ignorance is subdivided into 
two classes: (1) the simple ignorance (agnoia) 
which may be dispelled by instruction in the prac- 
tical arts and in the relations of life, and (2) the 
deeper ignorance (amathia) which sprmgs from 
thinking we know what we do not know, and 
which is cured by the higher instruction in the 
form either of admonition or of the peculiar art 
of conviction by dialectic (the elenchos) em- 
ployed by Socrates. 

Now from these typical passages of the Laws 
and the Sophist one’s first conclusion might be 
that Plato set apart surrender to the passions of 
anger and fear and pleasure as belonging to a 
different category altogether from ignorance and 
error of judgment. But that would be to mis- 
read his real meaning. In other dialogues such 
a distinction, instead of being maintained, is care- 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 247 


fully refined away. So, in the earlier Socratic 
pieces, bravery and temperance and friendliness 
appear somehow to be associated with knowledge 
and their contraries with ignorance. So, more 
specifically, it is said in the Protagoras that in- 
feriority to one’s self, or self-surrender (that is 
the dominance of the passions), is nothing but 
ignorance. And again, in the Laws, there is the 
statement that the worst form of ignorance is 
when a man does not love, but hates, that which 
seems to him beautiful and good, while he loves 
and welcomes that which seems evil and unjust. 
The whole tenor of Plato’s philosophy leads to 
the conclusion that all evil in the soul, however 
various its manifestations may be, is somehow 
the contrary of knowledge. 

Hence, to return to the diagram of the Sophist, 
it will be in conformity with Plato’s general 
method to take the analysis of evil as proceeding 
by way of subsumption rather than by way of ex- 
clusion. ‘That is to say the ignorance (amathia) 
which is the ultimate form of evil will not be with- 
out contact with the other forms of evil, but will 
be different in order, or precedence; it is at once 
a specific kind of vice and the source of all vice, 
just as vice itself is one, though it has manifold 
appearances. As seated deep in the reasoning 
faculty this ignorance is an evil to be cured by 
the Socratic elenchos, which, by throwing into re- 


358¢ 


689A 


230¢ 


248 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


lief the self-contradictions of the presumptuously 
wise, brings them to a state of wholesome humili- 
ty and renders them amenable to correction. 
“For, as physicians hold that the body can have 
no enjoyment from proffered nourishment before 
the internal hindrances are expelled, so the philo- 
sophic purgers of the soul believe that it can de- 
rive no benefit from proffered instruction before 
it is brought to a kind of shame by the elenchos 
of conviction, and thus, the opinions hostile to in- 
struction being driven out, it is made pure and 
thinks it knows only those things which it really 
knows.” In other words, the purging of pre- 
sumptuous ignorance must precede the instruc- 
tion in the arts of life, and is the sine qua non of 
such instruction; and in like manner such a pur- 
gation must prepare the way for the medicinal 
chastisement of the soul sick with the passions of 
anger and fear, pleasure and desire. Punish- 
ment, in fact, is always taken by Plato as a cor- 
rective rather than as a vindictive measure, and 
the penalties imposed on the soul which is, as it 
were, a victim of its own baser parts, are merely 
a special and drastic form of the Socratic elen- 
chos, brought to bear on the faction and self-con- 
tradiction of moral disease and so arousing the 
soul to efforts of self-mastery and unison. Until 
that inner conviction takes place the soul, under 
the sway of voluntary falsehood, “is content to 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 249 


wallow like a swinish beast in the mire of ignor- 
ance, and has no shame at being detected.” 

Knowledge and virtue are identical, but the 
ignorance which is the fountain-head of evil is not 
a mere lack of calculation in which the brain alone 
is concerned. Certainly Plato did not so regard 
it. Rather it is something which affects the whole 
soul and all the soul’s faculties—a something 
positive that can be purged away, as the peccant 
humours of the body are purged, so as to leave 
the soul in its purity, a true soul “in its philoso- 
phy,” cleansed of the base accretions it has taken 
into itself and akin to the divine and immortal 
and that which always is. 

More precisely the nature of this parent of the 
vices can be gathered by bringing together three 


10 Republic 535r: Td 8 dxovovov (WedSos) edkdAws mpoodexyTat 
kat duabaivovcd mov ddtoxouevn pa) ayavaxTy, GAA’ edyepOs 
omrep Onpiov veov év duaGia podvvytat.—This Platonic mean- 
ing of dyaia, as a stubborn unteachableness rather than passive 
ignorance, is quite in accord with the normal use of the word in 
literature. So, for instance, it will be found employed in the 
tragedies of Euripides to denote a wilful perversion of the mind 
for which the man is responsible (e.g. Bacchae 490, Madness of 
Hercules 172, Phoenician Maidens 763). And, passing down the 
centuries, one can see in Athanasius how this falls in with the 
constant tendency among the Greeks to assimilate the will and 
the understanding: "Eéeu d€ airovs, Aéyovras “Bovdjoen”” Tov vidv, 
eimety ote Kal “dpovyoe’ i: yéyove TavTov yap Tpyotpac Ppovnow 
kat BovAnow elvar’ 6 ‘yap Bovdeverac Tis, TOUTO WavTws Kaj 
dpovel’ Kal 0 ppovel, TovTo kai BovAcverat (Contra Ar. iii, 65). 


117» 


731pD 


Symposium 
204A 


Laws 8808 


250 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


or four scattered passages. In the First Alcibia- 
des it is said: “You understand, then, that our 
sins of practice are owing to this ignorance, that 
we think we know when we do not know”; and 
in the Laws this presumption of knowledge is 
further described thus: “The greatest evil to men, 
generally, is one which is innate in their souls, 
and which a man is always excusing in himself 
and so has no way of escaping. I mean what is 
expressed in the saying that every man is and 
ought to be dear to himself... . From this same 
fault arises the common habit of regarding our 
own ignorance (amathia)' as wisdom, and of 
thinking we know all things when, so to speak, 
we really know nothing.” By this deceit the very 
desire of enlightenment is killed and philosophy 
is cut off at the root: “for herein is the calamity 
of ignorance (amathia), that he who is neither 
good nor wise is nevertheless content with him- 
self; for feeling no want, he has no desire of that 
of which he has no conscious need.” And by the 
same conceit he is deprived of religious support 
in the hour of temptation; for the baser crimes are 
committed by those “who fear not the wrath of 
the gods or the storied vengeance of the nether 
world, but, as knowing what they by no means 
know, despise the ancient and universal belief of 
mankind.” This ignorance is clearly, then, a 


self-ignorance and is nourished by self-love. It 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 251 


is the opposite of that scepticism, or humility of 
the intellect, which Socrates held to be a twin 
growth with spiritual insight; it is the enemy of 
that command to “know thyself” which the god 
of Delphi announced as the beginning of religion. 
In the terms of Plato’s philosophy it might be 
defined as an inherent reluctance of the soul to 
face honestly the dualism of man’s nature, and, 
under the spur of a noble discontent, to acknow- 
ledge its own darker member and turn from that 
to what is akin in itself to the gods. 

The great enemy leagued against the soul, 
fostering its self-love by treacherous wiles, breed- 
ing the illusion that it knows what it does not 
know, disparaging the elenchos that would purge 
away the deadening humours of self-complai- 
sance, is flattery. And this foe is not simple, but 
manifold, insidious, beguiling, threatening. It 
smiles in every gift of pleasure that bids us barter 
the future for the present; it frowns in every ap- 
proach of pain; in the guise of honour and repu- 
tation it intrigues with every emotion of pride 
or resentment or the like that seems to magnify 
our personal importance. It assumes the garb 
of philosophy in a thousand maxims, preaching 
sermons of self-righteousness on such texts as 
these: that men are naturally virtuous and need 
only release from constraint to fulfill their nobler 
destiny, that of our own impulse we are unselfish 


463a ff. 


252 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


but have been warped by society, that not we but 
some one else is responsible for the evil we do, that 
education must be directed to develop our native 
bent and temperament, that self-respect is not 
compatible with reverence for authority, that 
fear is unmanly, that progress is by way of let- 
ting each man do as he pleases. The air of 
Athens was full of these flattering voices," which 
Plato called the utter dishonour of the soul, and 
which have not ceased to reverberate in the world. 
They had seized the stronghold of art and letters, 
and from it they have never been entirely ejected. 
When Plato, in the Gorgias, represents Socrates 
as defending his own practice against the more 
popular teachers of the day, he makes the use 
of flattery the point of distinction. As in the 
treatment of the body, he says, there is a true 
science of gymnastic and physic, of which the 
so-called arts of adornment and fine cooking are 
servile imitations, so in matters of the soul there 
is a true art of law and judgment in opposition 
to which the professors of literature have set up 


11 Athenaeus, who, if any one, ought to have understood the na- 
ture of flattery, has a striking passage (vi, 65) on the progress 
of the disease in Athens: Tovodro: té7’ éyévovro of "A@nvator Kod- 
axeias Onpiov xaderwrdtov AvVooav éuBarovons aitav tH mode 
; . Tept HS Kaas O Avoyevyns éAeye Todd Kpeirrov eivar és 
Képakas dreAOeiv 7) és KoAaKas. Athenaeus was thinking mainly 
of flattery in a gross form, but he quotes Plato also, in a way 
to show that he had some notion of the philosophical import of 
the word. 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 253 


their clever tricks of sophistic and rhetoric. And 
these pseudo-arts can be known by a definite 
trait, their appeal always is through flattery, open 
or disguised. So deep-rooted was this corruption 
that Plato, the master poet of words by nature 
and practice, did not quail from expelling poetry 
almost utterly from his city of philosophers.” 
Those are the enemies from the world, who 
clamber about the citadel of the soul. But there 
is a still worse enemy within—that rhathymia, 
‘indolence”’ or “effeminate slackness,” of the soul 
itself; “the master vice of all our business,” as 
Burke calls it, “degenerate and inglorious sloth.” 
The word rhathymia is not frequent in Plato’s 
Dialogues, but the idea is emphatically there, and 
its force may best be understood by glancing first 
at the ethical psychology of a late Christian ora- 
tor, St. Chrysostom, who in many respects was 
a faithful interpreter of the Platonic tradition. 
For the natural history of evil, as Chrysostom 
understood it, we need go no further than his 
three great sermons, the fourteenth (Field) on 
Romans and the second and fifth on Ephesians. 


12 Plato’s serious and final objection to poetry and the arts, as 
shown in the tenth book of The Republic, is owing to their ten- 
dency to flatter the emotional side of the soul and so to make 
rational self-control more difficult. Plutarch has an interesting 
passage, too long to quote, at the beginning of his Quomodo 
Adulator, on the Platonic connexion of ignorance, self-love 
(diAavtia), and flattery. 


254 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


According to the view here followed, as in all 
orthodox writing, the world is in the completest 
sense a creation of God, and as such is originally 
altogether good. Spirit and soul, as they spring 
into existence at the word of the Creator, are 
instinct with virtue and incline to that love and 
sympathy which are the fulfilment of the law. 
Neither is evil inherent in the flesh or in what we 
call nature. The desires associated with the body 
are intrinsically without blame, and the good life 
is that which is in accordance with nature, where- 
as the evil life is contrary to nature. So much 
must be held by any theist who takes an all-wise 
and all-powerful Deity as the starting point of his 
speculation. But Chrysostom, as an orthodox 
Christian, is equally convinced of the heinous 
reality of sin and of man’s responsibility therefor ; 
and to explain this perversion of human nature 
he has recourse to two expedients, which he min- 
gles together without being aware of their mutual 
incompatibility. By one of these man is created 
with a free power of choice and deliberately 
chooses evil as his portion. The operation of this 
choice is through the imagination, which corrupts 
the naturally healthy desires of the flesh. Thus, 
to take the illustration familiar to Chrysostom, 
the sexual impulse is implanted in the body by 
God for worthy ends, but by the imagination the 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 255 


soul corrupts this natural desire to a lust for un- 
natural and illicit satisfactions. 

But along with this theory of deliberate choice 
Chrysostom had another explanation of evil based 
on the notion of subordination (hypotagé). The 
flesh, with its desires, he still asserts, is as created 
intrinsically good, but it is of an inferior order 
to the soul, and retains its goodness only so long 
as this subordination endures. Evil, then, would 
be a kind of rebellion, by which the inferior part- 
ner of the corporation, so to speak, assumes 
authority and shakes off the regulating control 
of its natural ruler. But the responsibility for 
this inversion of order lies, again, not upon the 
flesh, which is endowed only with impulse and is 
without the principle of restraint, but upon the 
soul, which by its indolence suffers its delegated 
power of restraint to sink away.’ Hence arise 
the excess of desire and the tendency to limitless 
expansion of which is wrought all our misery. 
Why the body should contain this innate ten- 
dency to excess, which is the matter if not the 
cause of evil, Chrysostom does not explain, nor 
could he easily explain it while remaining true to 
his theory of creation. Attributing evil to the 
soul, however, he can speak of it, not as a matter 
of deliberate choice, but as the result of a de- 

13 In Galat. 7208: Totro 8€ od cwyatos Katnyopia, a\XAa pa- 
Ovpov Wuxns eyxAnua. 


256 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


ficiency of energy (rhathymia), a failure of at- 
tention. 

This is the theory of evil, as a failure of the 
negative will, or will to refrain, rather than a vice 
of the positive will, which Chrysostom stresses; 
it is in accordance with such a view that he sees 
our peril less in the violent temptations, whose 
very magnitude, striking an innocent soul, would 
frighten it from a course of sin, than in those 
little relaxations which individually seem of no 
importance, but gradually form a habit of indif- 
ference and in the end leave the soul without 
power of resistance.” By this indolence the law 
of God is made of no avail.” 

Now eliminate from Chrysostom’s ethical 
theory the metaphysical ideas of God and crea- 
tion, and you will have remaining the doctrine of 
pure Platonism. It is this rhathymia that leads 


14°*Arpooecia, In Ephes. 37c, et passim. 

15 See, e.g., In Mat. 815a, and In Rom. 554cg. 

16In Rom. 55%p: Tl0d0ev otv % apaptia yéyovev, ei ottw Oav- 
pactos 6 8i8doKxados (i.e. 6 vowos); mapa tHv Tov pabyTaov 
paOvuuiav. What follows bears on the relation between rhathymia 
and ignorance. The interest of Chrysostom is almost purely 
psychological; he was the Christian preacher par excellence. But 
in some of the earlier theologians, beginning with Clement of 
Alexandria (Strom. VII, vii, 46: oiSev yap kat trav dayyéAwy 
Twas tro paduytas dAvcOnoaytas . . .), and continuing through 
Origen and Athanasius, the notion of rhathymia is carried back 
into the cosmic drama of the Fall. The further exposition of the 
subject must be reserved for a later volume. 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 257 


men to rest lazily in a materialistic philosophy, 
explaining their actions by those mechanical 
causes which are first visible to the eye, and for- 
going the search after the ethical motives which 
are the true springs of our life. It is against the 
innate indolence of the will that the whole scheme 
of Platonic education is directed. In The Re- 
public a severe training in resistance and endur- 
ance is prescribed for the rulers to the end that 
they may be rendered impervious to the flattery 
and juggling deceits of pleasure; and the final 
test of the guardian of the State is his ability to 
guard within his soul the deposit of the truth 
against.all the seductions of time. So the down- 
ward course of the soul and the State, in what 
may be called the Tyrant’s Progress of the eighth 
and ninth books, follows a successive yielding to 
the indulgence of temperament. The elaborate 
discipline of the Laws in the choice of pleasures 
and pains looks to a strengthening of that part 
of the soul which imposes a due check on the out- 
reaching desires. Everywhere in the Dialogues 
the life of philosophy is represented as a death- 
less battle within the fortress of the soul, a con- 
stant warfare, in which vigilance is the price of 
liberty. Few are the victors, but the reward is 
fair and great the hope.” 


17 The connexion of this theory of rhathymia with Aristotle’s 
doctrine of évépyeva, and with the Stoic conception of doGévera 


Phaedo 998 


413c ff. 


Phaedo 114¢ 


258 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


So, I think, we can understand what Plato 
meant by identifying vice with a kind of ignor- 
ance that must be purged away. Many of the 
mishaps of life, the wrongs that so easily might 
have been avoided, he would attribute to ignor- 
ance in the simplest sense of the word,—the ig- 
norance of circumstances, of means, of persons, 
the fumbling of inexperience, the stupidity of the 
well-intentioned: 


“Our faults no tenderness should ask, 

The chastening stripes must cleanse them all; 
But for our blunders—oh, in shame 

Before the eyes of heaven we fall. 


“Earth bears no balsam for mistakes; 
Men crown the knave, and scourge the tool 
That did his will; but Thou, O Lord, 


Be merciful to me, a fool!’’*® 


But behind these more or less venial errors lies 
the dark reach of an ignorance like a mist in the 
soul spreading from its self-love and indolence, as 
from a noisome stagnant pool, a mist wherein the 
pleasures near at hand loom up in exaggerated 
magnitude, while the remoter consequences are 
or itovia as the cause of 7a0y, need only be mentioned. An in- 
teresting parallel also might be drawn with the pamdda of Bud- 


dhism and the accidia of medieval theology. 
18 From The Fool's Prayer of Edward Rowland Sill. 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 259 


not seen at all or are beheld vaguely as unreal 
phantoms.” Hence that illusion of the near and 
the far, the skiagraphia of a misleading perspec- 
tive, as Plato was fond of describing it, which 
distorts the facts of life and renders us a prey to 
the flattery of the present and to immediate solici- 
tations. And in that cloud the soul is benumbed Pics 273¢ 
by a kind of lethean torpor into forgetfulness of 
itself and of its dower of happiness, of its God 
and of the eternal laws implanted in it originally 
as a memory to be clung to strenuously through 
all the vicissitudes of birth and rebirth. And so, 
by this initial lack of attention, we fall into that 
proton pseudos, the first lie, of the soul that 
knows not what it knows and does not know. 
For this perversion of ignorance the soul is re- 
sponsible, since the cause is entirely within itself. 
Yet in a way, too, the evil may be said to be in- 
voluntary, since it is not a willing choice of the 
soul, but, as it were, a failure to choose at all, a 
mere sluggish drifting with the tides of tempera- 
ment. 

So far Plato carries the analysis of evil, to the 
ignorance that is involved in self-love and rhathy- 
mia beginning somewhere in the far backward 

19 Laws 8158: H Ovnty pio, . . . pevyovoa piv ddoyus Thy 
AUvrny, Sudxovea S€ rHv Adovyv, Tod Se Sixarorepov Te Kal dpecvovos 
emimpoobev dudw TovtTw mpoorncerat, Kal oKOTOS drepyalouevn ev 
avTy mdvTwY KaK@Y éumAHTEL TpOS TO TéAOS adTHY TE Kal THY 
moAw OAnv. 


260 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


and abysm of time; but if you inquire into the 
further cause of this failure of the inhibiting will, 
there is no answer given in the Dialogues, nor do 
I think you will find satisfaction elsewhere. 
Plato has traced the stream to the last discover- 
able source in the consciousness of the soul itself, 
and to seek to go beyond that is to pass into the 
emptiness of metaphysics. As we have seen, it 
is tempting to explain the defection of the will 
and the ignorance of self-love as belonging to the 
dark Necessity of the phenomenal work of crea- 
tion, and such an explanation is sound to this 
extent, that moral evil also goes back to a prin- 
ciple of spontaneous disorder. But the analogy 
breaks down, for the reason that the Necessity of 
nature is one term of an outer dualism, of which 
the Creator is the other term, whereas the im- 
pulses of disorder and of the refraining will are 
both in the soul itself, members of its constitu- 
tion. 

In the long course of metempsychosis, as we 
pass through the calamities of successive lives, 
Plato believed that the soul could be trained and 
frightened into heedfulness, and might awake at 
the last to a realization of its happiness. Then, 
as Plato says in the language of mythology, it 
shall be brought back in its purity to the star in 
which its immortal part was born and where it 
was indoctrinated in the everlasting truths which 


THE PROBLEM OF EVIL 261 


it seems to have lost in this world, or holds so 
precariously. Meanwhile philosophy is the clear 

and present call to the soul to shake off its lethar- 

gy of ignorance, if it may learn a little of itself 

and its destinies. And fortunate the man who in 

this life finds a monitor, whether it be the still 

voice within his own breast or a friendly Socra- 

tes, to warn him of his peril before the twilight ene 
darkens into night. “There is one who cares for “iso. 
you. But it seems to me that, as in the Homeric 


story Athena took away the mist from the eyes 
of Diomed, 


‘In order that he might know well both god and man,’ 


so this monitor of yours must first remove from 
your soul the mist which now envelops it, and 
then, in good time, he shall bring to you the know- 
ledge both of evil and of good.” 


715E 


716 


CHAPTER X 


THE RELIGIOUS LIFE 
TRANSLATION FROM LAWS IV AND V 


[The concluding paragraphs of the fourth 
book of the Laws and the opening paragraphs 
of the fifth are in the nature of a general pre- 
amble, a kind of preface thrown, Shandean-like, 
into the midst of the work. In substance this 
section forms a unit with the tenth book, and in 
the order of thought follows the exposition of the 
three theological theses. Here, as in the tenth 
book, the Athenian Stranger is expounding his 
views to his Lacedaemonian and Cretan com- 
rades. | 


Boox IV 


O men, we shall say to them, God, as the an- 
cient report is, holding the beginning and the end 
and the middle of all things that are, moves 
straight on to his goal by the seemingly devious 
ways of nature;’ and with him follows always 


1A passage much quoted by the Fathers; see, for instance, 
Clemens Alex., Protrepticus vi, 69. The last phrase, of disputed 
meaning, is thus translated in the old Latin version of Irenaeus 
(III, xli Harvey): Et Deus quidem, quemadmodum et vetus ser- 
mo est, initium et finem et medietates omnium quae sunt habens, 
recte perficit, secundum naturam circumiens. 


262 


LAWS, IV AND V 263 


Justice, the avenger of those that depart from 
the divine law. To this Justice he that will be 
happy clings, and follows with her, humble and 
chastened. But another man, being lifted up by 
pride, or exalted by money or honours, or even 
by the beauty of body when young and foolish, 
is inflamed in soul and made insolent, as if he 
needed no ruler or guide, but were himself fit to 
guide others. He is left desolate of God, and 
being so left and drawing after him others of 
like nature, wantons and throws all things into 
confusion; and to many of a sort he seems to be 
somebody, but after a time, and that not long, he 
succumbs to the unblamable vengeance of Justice, 
and brings himself and his house and city to utter 
ruin. Since then the laws are so ordered, what 
should the wise man do and have in mind, and 
what not? 

In a word, what course of action is dear and 
consonant to God? One course there is, having 
warrant in one ancient report, that like will be 
dear to like, being measured, whereas things 
unmeasured will be dear neither to one another 
nor to the measured. Now God in a special sense 
would be for us the measure of all things, and in 
a way that no man,’ as they say, can be. He 


2Plato has dealt at length in the Theaetetus with the Prota- 
gorean doctine of man as the measure of all things used as an 
argument for relativity. 


717 


264 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


therefore who will be dear to such a one must 
himself become such another; and it follows that 
he of us who is temperate is dear to God, being 
like, and the intemperate is unlike and hostile, as 
is the unjust, and so on with the other virtues and 
vices. Wherefore let us hold to this report as 
agreeing with what has been said, the fairest and 
truest, I think, of all reports, that to make sacri- 
fice and always to have intercourse with the gods 
by prayer and offering and all divine service is 
for the good man the fairest and best and most 
effective instrument of the happy life, as it is 
preéminently suitable to him; while to the bad 
man the way is just the contrary. For the bad 
man is impure of soul, whereas the good man is 
pure, and it is never right that a good man or a 
god should receive gifts from the unclean; so 
that for the unholy much pains about the gods 
is labour wasted, but for all holy men most profit- 
able. This, then, is the mark at which we ought 
to aim; but what are the words that would go 
like missiles straight to the goal? 

In the first place we say that a man would hit 
the mark of piety most squarely by setting aside 
for the nether gods things of even number and 
second rank and sinister omen, as subordinate to 
the honours due to the Olympian deities and 
those that guard the city, reserving for these lat- 
ter the superior and contrary things. After these 


LAWS, IV AND V 265 


gods the thoughtful man will worship the dae- 
mons, and after them the heroes. Next to these 
should come the special altars of the paternal 
gods, consecrated by law, and then honours to liv- 
ing parents. For it is right that a debtor should 
pay the first and greatest of his debts, of all obli- 
gations the most ancient, and that he should hold 
all his possessions as the property of those who 
begot and nourished him, to be rendered to them 
in service with all diligence—first his goods, then 
his body, and thirdly the things of the soul—re- 
paying as debts contracted in his youth the an- 
cient cares and pangs of those who suffered for 
him, and making return to the old in their time 
of need. Through the whole course of life his 
parents should have had and should have from 
him the greatest courtesy of speech, since heavy 
indeed may be the penalty of light winged words 
(over all these Nemesis, the angel of Justice, is 
appointed guardian) ; and he should yield to his — 
parents when they are angry, and when they 
wreak their anger and take it out in words or 
deeds, remembering submissively that it is right 
and natural for a father to be highly angered with 
a son who in his opinion has wronged him. When 
parents die, the most temperately conducted 
funeral is the fairest, one that neither surpasses 
the customary display, nor falls behind what our 
ancestors have done at the burial of their parents. 


718 


726 


727 


266 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


In like manner we should perform such annual 
ceremonies for the dead as will keep their honour 
alive; and in this we most honour them, in main- 
taining their memory fresh and in expending 
upon them, when their toils are over, according 
to the measure of our fortune. By such acts and 
by such a life we shall each of us receive from the 
gods our due reward and from our betters, pass- 
ing the most part of our existence in good 
hopessce). 


Boox V 


Hearken now every one who heard what was 
said concerning the gods and our own dear fore- 
fathers! 

Of all a man’s possessions, after the gods, his 
soul is the most godlike, being his truest self. 
To every man his all is dual. To the stronger and 
better things pertains mastery, to the lesser and 
baser servitude; wherefore always a man should 
honour the master parts of himself above the 
servile. And thus my exhortation is justified 
when I declare that the second honour belongs 
to a man’s own soul after the gods, who are our 
masters, and after their subordinates. Yet no one 
of us, I might almost say, gives honour rightly, 
however it may seem. For honour is in a way a 
divine good, and bears with it nothing of evil; 
and he who thinks to magnify the soul by any 


LAWS, IV AND V 267 


words or gifts or by yielding to it in any way,’ 
without rendering it better than it was, seems to 
honour it, but in no wise does so. Every man, 
even when a child, believes himself capable of 
knowing all things, and thinks to honour his soul 
by praising it, and is zealous to permit it to act 
in whatever way it desires; whereas the present 
argument avers that by doing this he injures his 
soul instead of honouring it, though, as we say, 
the soul deserves the second honour after the 
gods. Neither when a man thinks that he himself 
is not responsible for his various sins and the 
many and great evils of his life, but holds others 
responsible and always excepts himself as guilt- 
less, neither then does he honour his soul, as he 
believes, but quite otherwise; for he injures it. 
Neither when he indulges in pleasures contrary 
to the advice and commendation of the lawgiver, 
does he then really honour his soul, but does it 
dishonour by filling it with evils and remorse. 
Neither on the other hand when he endures not 

8Tigiv wretEeow. There is scarcely a phrase that touches 
more closely than this the quick of Plato’s religion. As he in- 
sists in the Gorgias and the Sophist and in a hundred other 
places, all the power of false philosophy, all the seduction of 
base literature, is in this trick of flattering the soul by bidding 
it forget its dual nature and yield to its egotistic impulses. He 
who has looked deeply and fearlessly enough into his own heart 
to discover there the buried roots of self-flattery is a dualist, 


and I do not know that philosophy means much more than this. 
Pidocodia dé od Kodaxeder, says Clement. 


728 


268 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


to go through the labours commended by the 
lawgiver and the fears and pains and hardships, 
but gives way, does he honour the soul by yield- 
ing; for he renders it dishonoured by all such 
acts. Neither does he honour it, when he thinks 
that life at any cost is good, but then also he dis- 
honours it; for, with a soul that looks upon all 
that may happen in Hades as evil, he yields and 
offers no resistance, instead of instructing it and 
bringing it to the conviction that in reality it 
does not know whether these things that happen 
under the gods of the nether world may not be 
the greatest of all blessings, rather than evils. 
Neither, again, when any one honours beauty 
above virtue, is this aught but the real and utter 
dishonour of the soul. For such a belief says that 
the body is more honourable than the soul, yet 
lies, since nothing born of earth is more hon- 
ourable than the Olympians, and he that believes 
otherwise concerning the soul knows not that he 
is neglecting this most marvellous possession.” 
Neither when one has his heart set on gaining 
money, save by fair means, or is even at ease with 

4This was the thought that gave Socrates courage to follow 
the command of the god through many dangers and to face with 


a smile of contempt the ordeal of trial and death, See the 
Apology 29a. 

5 Clement, Prot. iv: Téte cov yrwpiow 70 Kdddos, OTe Kabapay 
TETHpHKAS THV eixova,—Marcus Aurelius iii, 2: Tots €avrov 
cddppoow dpbadpois dpav. 


LAWS, IV AND V 269 


such gaining, does he then bestow gifts of honour 
upon his soul; rather, he degrades it thereby, sell- 
ing what is precious and fair in the soul at the 
price of a little gold, whereas all the gold on 
the earth and under the earth is not equal in 
value to virtue. 

And, to sum up in a word, certain things the 
lawgiver has enumerated and laid down as shame- 
ful and evil and certain other things as good and 
fair, and he who does not set his whole mind on 
abstaining from the former and on practicing 
the latter to the extent of his power, is ignorant 
of the fact that any man in such a state is most 
dishonourably and disgracefully disposed in that 
most divine part of himself, the soul. No one, 
I might almost say, calculates the greatest award 
of justice, to use the common phrase, upon evil- 
doing; and this is the award, great indeed, that 
he is made like to men who are evil, and, being 
like to these, flees from good men and good 
words, and severs himself, while he attaches him- 
self to the evil by pursuing their society. So, 
by joining himself to such men, he is obliged to 
do and suffer what it is the nature of such men 
to do and say to one another. Yet, properly 
speaking, what happens to them is not the award 
of justice—for justice and its award is a fair 
thing—but vengeance, which follows as the re- 
sult of injustice. And he that undergoes this ven- 


270 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


geance is miserable, as is he that escapes it, the 
one because he perishes in order that many may 
be saved, the other because he is left without 
healing.® And, in a word, our honour is to fol- 
low the better things, and to do what we can 
that the evil which is curable may thus turn out 
for the better. 

Now the soul is the possession of a man above 
all adapted by nature to flee evil and to pursue 
and capture the supreme good, and having cap- 
tured it to dwell in its company the remainder of 
his life. Wherefore the soul stands second in 
honour [to the gods], and third, as every one 
will admit, is the natural honour of the body. 
But it still remains to examine the honours [of 
the body], and to determine which of them are 
genuine and which are counterfeit, and this is 
the business of the lawgiver. Now to me he 
seems to indicate their character in this way: the 
body is honourable not when it is fair or strong or 
swift or great or even healthy—though such 
would be the opinion of many—nor yet when it 
shows the opposite qualities; but the middle state 
of habit in all such cases is the most temperate 
and at the same time far the safest, for the one 


6 This is a favourite thought of Plato, that punishment should 
be welcomed as a measure of drastic healing, and that he who 
escapes the penalty of wrong-doing is the more to be pitied, 
being left, for the time at least, to harden in sin. See Gorgias 
ATGa ff. 


LAWS, IV AND V 271 


extreme puffs up the soul and makes it arrogant, 
while the other renders it mean and illiberal. 
Money and possessions generally are subject to 
the same rule, to be honoured in the same pro- 
portion. For excess in all such things creates 
faction and enmities in cities and in individuals, 
while deficiency for the most part produces ser- 
vility. No one therefore should be always piling 
up money, that he may leave his children as rich 
as possible; such wealth is an advantage neither 
to them nor to the city. Rather, wealth that will 
not attract flatterers about the young, yet is suf- 
ficient for real needs, this is of all best fitted for 
what might be called the harmony of existence, 
for, being in tune with our nature and fitted for 
all chances, it makes life easy and painless. A 
treasure of modesty, not of gold, we should leave 
to our children. And such an inheritance we sup- 
pose we shall prepare by rebuking the young 
whenever they show disrespect; but this result 
does not come from harping on the sort of admo- 
nition now common, that youth should always be 
respectful. ‘The wise lawgiver will rather advise 
the old to show respect for the young, and to be 
most particular that no youth should ever see or 
hear them doing or saying anything base, since 
wherever age is shameless, there youth is certain 
to be without modesty. So true is it that the bet- 
ter instruction of both the young and their elders 


729 


Q72 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


is not in giving admonition but in being seen 
throughout life to do those things which one 
would admonish another to do. 

By honouring and reverencing one’s kindred 
and all those who are united by blood and by com- 
munity of worship a man will have these gods of 
the family and of birth correspondingly propi- 
tious for the begetting of children. So too will 
he win friends and comrades for the kindly inter- 
course of life, if he esteems their services to him 
as greater and more imposing than they do, while 
of his own favours to his friends and comrades 
he thinks less than of their favours to him. In 
relation to his city and fellow citizens he is by 
far the best man who, before the victory at Olym- 
pia or in any other of the warlike and peaceful 
contests, would prefer to be victor in the repu- 
tation for serving the home laws, as the one who 
had served these in his life the most nobly of all 
men. 

We must consider that the most sacred of busi- 
ness dealings are those with foreigners; since 
these are under a god’s care, whose vengeance is 
quicker upon all sins touching foreigners than 
upon those touching citizens. This is because the 
foreigner, being devoid of comrades and kinsmen, 
is more an object of pity to men and gods. He 
that is abler to avenge is more zealous to help, 
and there is none so able and zealous as the pe- 


LAWS, IV AND V 273 


culiar daemon and god of the foreigner who fol- 
low in the train of Zeus the Protector. He, then, 
who has a spark of prudence will be very cau- 
tious to make his journey to the end of life with- 
out committing any of the sins against foreign- 
ers. But of the sins touching either foreigners 
or citizens that is the greatest which concerns sup- 
pliants of any sort; for the god who is witness to 
an agreement made with a suppliant becomes the 
suppliant’s special guardian, and will not leave 
him unavenged if any wrong, even the least, be- 
fall him. 

So much for the obligations that concern 
one’s parents and one’s self and one’s possessions, 
the city and friends and kindred, in matters for- 
eign and domestic. We have finished these in a 
way, and it now remains to consider the charac- 
ter itself of the man who would conduct his life 
in the fairest manner. Our next subject there- 
fore will be the training which comes to us rather 
through the influence of praise and blame than 
directly from the laws, but which renders us more 
amenable and docile to the laws when passed. 
Now truth is the beginning of all good to the 
gods, of all good to men; he who will be blessed 
and happy will lay hold of it at the earliest mo- 
ment, in order that he may live a true man for the 
greatest length of time. So will he be trusted; 
whereas he is without trust who loves voluntary 


730 


274 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


falsehood, and he who loves involuntary false- 
hood is a fool—neither of whom is enviable. For 
a man without trust or a fool has no friends; as 
time goes on he is found out, having prepared 
for himself a perfect solitude and a hard old age 
when years are upon him, when his life shall be 
as it were orphaned equally whether his acquaint- 
ance and children are living or dead. 

He indeed is worthy of honour who does no 
injustice, but he is doubly worthy, and more, 
who does not even permit the unjust to carry out 
their evil intentions; for the former stands for 
himself alone, while the latter stands for many 
besides himself, by keeping the injustice of others 
before the magistrates. And he who to the best 
of his power assists the magistrates in meting out 
punishment, the great man and perfect citizen, he 
shall be proclaimed victor in the contest of virtue.’ 
The same commendation should be bestowed up- 
on temperance and wisdom, and upon all the ex- 
cellences possessed by a man which are of a kind 
to be shared with others as well as enjoyed by 
himself. He who communicates them should re- 
ceive the highest honour; he who is willing to 
communicate but lacks ability should be left to 
the second honour; the envious man, who is un- 

7 It should be remembered that there was no public prosecutor 


in the Greek city, and that the indictment of even such crimes 
as treason depended on the initiative of private citizens. 


LAWS, IV AND V 275 


willing in the way of friendship to share any ex- 
cellence he may possess, deserves censure as a 
man, yet the possession of virtue itself must not 
suffer dishonour on his account, being still a thing 
to acquire with all diligence. Let every man in 
our city be ambitious of excellence without envy. 
Such a one magnifies a State, contending for his 
own honour, while not curtailing the honour of 
others by slander. But the envious man, who 
thinks he must excel by lowering the reputation 
of others, is himself less ardent in the race for 
genuine excellence, and by his slanders takes the 
spirit out of his competitors; thus rendering the 
whole city indifferent in the contest of virtue, 
and doing what he can to destroy its good name. 

Indignation is a faculty every man should own, 
yet meek too he must be so far as possible.” For 
we have no way to ward off the inveterate and 
hardly cured, or irremediable, injustice of others 
save by fighting and defending ourselves victori- 
ously and by letting no wrong go unpunished; and 
no one can be successful in this without the spirit 
of generous indignation in his soul. As for the 
deeds of the unjust which are yet remediable, 
know first of all that every unjust man is unjust 


8 This union of meekness with the faculty of indignation occurs 
constantly in Plato as a type, or the fountain head, of the ethical 
mean which was to be worked out by Aristotle in detail for all 
the virtues. See next chapter, note 3, 


731 


276 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


involuntarily; for of a surety no one would ever 
take to himself voluntarily the greatest of evils, 
least of all in the most honourable parts of him- 
self. But the soul, as we have said, is veritably 
to all men the most honoured thing they possess, 
and it is inconceivable that anyone should vol- 
untarily admit the greatest evil into this most 
honoured part of himself, and live his life through 
with such a possession. No doubt every unjust 
man and every one who harbours in himself evil 
things is pitiable; yet it behooves us to pity the 
evil man only so long as there is hope of remedy. 
For such a one we should keep our indignation 
gentle by restraint, and not grow bitter like a 
woman and yield to relentless rage, which ought 
to be reserved for the transgressor whose evil is 
unamenable to reason or control. Wherefore we 
say that it becomes the good man, whatever may 
happen, to have the spirit both of indignation and 
of meekness. 

The greatest evil to men, generally, is one 
which is innate in their souls, and which a man is 
always excusing in himself and so has no way of 
escaping. I mean what is expressed in the say- 
ing that every man is and ought to be dear to 
himself. Whereas the truth is that this absorb- 
ing self-love is continually and in all men the 
cause of all their faults; for the lover is blinded in 
regard to the object of his passion, so that he is 


LAWS, IV AND V 277 


a bad judge of the just and the good and the 
beautiful, always fancying that he ought to 
honour what belongs to him above the truth. Yet, 
really, he who would be a great man ought not to 
cherish himself or his possessions, but the things 
that are just, whether they pertain to himself or 
to the conduct of another. From this same fault 
arises the common habit of regarding our own 
ignorance as wisdom, and of thinking we know 
all things when, so to speak, we really know 
nothing. 


732 


CHAPTER XI 


RELIGIOUS LIFE: WORSHIP 


Hitherto we have been studying the religion 
of Plato in its component elements—philosophy, 
theology, mythology—keeping these apart so 
far as their nature and overlapping would per- 
mit. It was, we observed, a notable character- 
istic of Plato’s method that his tone varied in 
assurance and directness as one or another of 
these components was the subject of his dis- 
course. But though religion may be thus ana- 
lysed into its elements, still no one of these ele- 
ments alone is religion in any full or satisfactory 
sense—not philosophy, which, pursued separate- 
ly, leaves the soul friendless in a world of austere 
impersonal law; not theology, which of itself is 
in danger of forgetting the eternal primacy of 
the moral law; not mythology alone, which too 
easily falls into a vain, even a degrading, super- 
stition. Nor yet is religion a mechanical juxta- 
position of the three, but an emotion, an aspira- 
tion, a faith, a knowledge, a life, a something 
born of their intimate union and codperation. 
Our last task will be to consider a little more close- 


278 


WORSHIP 279 


ly how these constituents of religion are blended 
together, while retaining their individual note. 
The beginning of the religious life is in that 
right honour of the soul which Plato connects 
with his philosophy of dualism: “To every man 
his all is dual. To the stronger and better things 
pertains mastery, to the lesser and baser servi- 
tude; wherefore always a man should honour the 
master parts of himself above the servile.” To 
honour the soul is to make righteousness the end 
of life, and the reward at once and measure of 
righteousness is happiness. That would seem to 
be the full circle of Plato’s philosophy so far as 
it belongs to religion—a thesis so simple in ap- 
pearance that many may pass it by as common- 
place or reject it as insignificant. But within 
this circle there is range for endless experience 
and reflection, as he will find who attempts to 
walk therein. He will soon learn, for instance, 
that happiness is entangled in a vast network of 
pleasures, some of them strangely like happiness, 
others appearing as hideous caricatures of it, and 
that to see clearly in this confusion of feelings 
requires the last refinement of wisdom, a self- 
knowledge which comes only after much intro- 
spection and abstinence, or sometimes, as Plato 
would say, by a divine gift. And, again, right- 
eousness is so involved in artificial standards of 
virtue as to seem to all but the most steadfast 


Laws 885B 


280 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


souls itself no more than a product of ever-shift- 
ing opinion. Only when happiness has been dis- 
tinguished from pleasure and confirmed by self- 
knowledge will righteousness be set free from the 
flux of opinions about right and wrong as a truth 
immutable and eternal, a law not made by man or 
subject to his choice, not even definable by man 
in its essential nature though still discoverable 
everywhere in its operation. 

But this “philosophy of the soul” takes on the 
colour of religion when it is regarded as subor- 
dinate to the honour of the divine soul whom we 
call God; for God is greater than man. “No 
one,” says Plato, “who believes in the existence 
of the gods as by law and custom established has 
ever voluntarily done an impious deed or uttered 
a lawless word. If he has done so it is for one of 
three reasons: either he does not believe in the 
existence of the gods, as I said, or, secondly, he 
believes that they exist but have no care for men, 
or, thirdly, that they are placable and can be 
turned from their course by sacrifice and 
prayers.” Now Plato does not here assert that 
a man may not from philosophy alone pursue a 
just and noble life—such an assertion would run 
counter to the great hypothesis of The Republic 
—but his words do imply that philosophy ac- 
quires a powerful confirmation in the right kind 
of theological belief, and that such a belief, if 


WORSHIP 281 


raised on the foundation of philosophical know- 
ledge, will save a man from all presumptuous 
sin, that is to say, will turn the tide of a man’s 
being steadfastly away from sin towards holi- 
ness. By the right kind of belief Plato did not 
mean that empty lip-acknowledgment of the 
semi-atheists who relegated the gods to some in- 
termundane region of slothful ease, while de- 
volving all the government of the world upon 
chance or mechanical law; his belief was close 
to the faith of St. Paul. And, further, this be- 
lief cannot be severed from philosophy; the gods 
are inexorably, implacably just, because the law 
of justice is no more their creation than it is 
man’s, and is no less binding upon them than up- 
on man. 

He who thus believes will be filled with awe 
and admiration of the divine nature; he will de- 
sire to be beloved of God even as he loves God, 
and will endeavour to make himself worthy of 
God’s love by imitation of God’s holiness. Good 
and evil there must be in the sum of things, but 
evil is not with the gods; it dwells in this world 
of ours, in the walks of mortal creatures, and the 
life of the religious man will be a flight from evil 
and an assimilation of the human to the divine 
nature, in so far as this is possible, by rendering 
himself just and righteous, even as God is free 
from all injustice and unrighteousness. 


Euthyphro 
GE ff. 


Theaetetus 
176A 


282 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


This is the doctrine of homoidsis thedi, “the be- 
coming like to God,” which permeates the whole 
of Plato’s religion, and which is equally funda- 
mental to Christianity. It is the thought that, 
perhaps more than any other, links the religious 
experience of Greece into one unbroken tradition. 

Justice and righteousness and holiness may 
seem to be rather vague terms as they come to us 
from theology, but they acquire a more practical 
value when coloured by the mythological notion 
of measure. Now it is scarcely too much to say 
that the ethics of Platonism can be summed up 
in the phrase, T'o be strong unto measuredness, 
or as Jowett translates it more elegantly, Hold 
out and observe moderation. And in this law 
two things are implied, or enjoined. First there 
is the needed strength, involving resolution of 
purpose and continuity of attention, the main- 
taining of the soul in its citadel against all the 
assaults of excess and the enticements of defect. 
That is a state not altering as it alteration finds, 
but fixed and certain, the constant opposite of 
rhathymia. In this sense justice, as an inhibition 
of the ever-encroaching disproportion of desires, 
and temperance, as an inner balance, are the ab- 
solute virtues of God and the divine virtues in 


man.’ 


1 Laws 918p: Kaptepeiy mpos 10 pérptov. 
2 Republic 359c: Ad tHv wAcoveciav, 0 taca vats SiwKeww 


WORSHIP 283 


But besides this strength of purpose the law 
implies the need of a wisdom which comes not by 
willing alone but by practice. Ina general way it 
can be said that the effect of measure displays 
itself in a balance of two opposite tendencies, one 
of which, if left to itself, passes from courage to 
recklessness and insolence, the other from tem- 
perance to effeminacy and abjection. Out of 
these two strands, the quick, obstinate, master- 
ful, and the slow, yielding, servile, as from the 
warp and woof on a weaver’s loom, is wrought 
the royal web of character; out of such elements 
in the temper of the people is constructed that 
balanced government which is neither tyranny 
nor licentious democracy, but true aristocracy.” 


mépuxe os dyabdv, vopw S& Bia mapdyetar eri thy Tov toov 
tiynv. The words are those of Thrasymachus, but they are true 
in a way which he did not intend. 

3 The locus classicus for this balance of the mpgov and the 
Gvpoerdés is the climax of the Politicus (306a ff). Other passages 
showing the wide application of the principle are Theaetetus 
1444; Republic 375c, 410p, 503c; Laws 731s, 77338. In the Nico- 
machean Ethics Plato’s pupil developed the conception into a 
complete code of the golden mean, and in this form it has come 
down to the modern world; but it is essentially and originally 
Platonic, if one should not say Greek, It is important to add 
that Aristotle, by separating God so absolutely from the world, 
left a chasm between the contemplative life and the law of 
measure which has had mischievous consequences for religion. 
Plato’s conception of God as the personal cause of measure is a 
safer guide for both contemplation and conduct, and for the full 
religious life which is the harmonious union of the two. 


284 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Beyond this it is difficult to formulate the law. 
There is no ready rule that tells a man in each 
of his acts what is the right measure and what 
is excess or defect; and it is a remarkable trait 
of the Dialogues that, with all their discussion 
of morality and of the various virtues, they con- 
tain nothing corresponding to a Jesuitical casuis- 
try or even approaching the precepts of Aris- 
totle’s Nicomachean Ethics. This omission may 
be due in part to the fact that Plato was sur- 
veying a new field and left the details to be filled 
in by later hands. But in part also, I think, his 
reticence must be attributed to his perception of 
the lack of finality in any such prescriptions. 
Politicus 294a“Tt is not for the law,” he declares, ““comprehend- 
ing what is best and most just for all men at 
once, to lay down exact rules as to what is the 
highest good for them. The dissimilarities of 
men and their conduct, and the fact that nothing 
of humanity ever, so to speak, abides in quiet, 
preclude the possibility of any simple code which 
shall be universal and permanent.” Plato would 
say that in the tangled events of life we have no 
lawgiver, human or divine, to tell us once for 
all what we should do and from what we should 
refrain, but that our only guide is the wisdom of 
experience. Knowledge comes slowly by obser- 
vation and tradition, and even so is never final. 
This is the paradox of morality, from which 


WORSHIP 285 


there is no escaping. If we look upon the actual 
events of life, justice and all fair things seem 
never to be in one stay; and this is so true that 
most men, whose eyes are made dizzy by gazing 
too persistently upon the revolving wheels of 
change, see nothing at last but custom and arti- 
fice: that is just, they declare, which today is so 
esteemed, and that is fair which today gives 
pleasure, and today’s opinion is as well based as 
yesterday’s or tomorrow’s. Yet there is a Neme- 
sis that follows such a conclusion—the ancient 
law announced by the poets that men shall learn 
by suffering, and proclaimed by science that ex- 
perience is a sure teacher. In so far as our work- 
ing codes of justice are falsely formulated they 
result in confusion and thwarted growth; in so 
far as they correspond to the unseen forces con- 
trolling our nature they result in prosperity and 
sound development. So it is that through the 
kaleidoscopic ventures of life we learn a little of 
the truth and catch glimpses of a “power not 
ourselves that makes for righteousness.” And 
here is the point of contact with mythology. “In 
a word, what course of action is dear and con- 
sonant to God? One course there is, having war- 
rant in one ancient report, that like will be 
dear to like, being measured, whereas things 
unmeasured will be dear neither to one another 
nor to the measured. Now God in a special sense 


Republic 
Bk. v, 
conclusion 


286 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


would be for us the measure of all things, and in 
a way that no man, as they say, can be. He 
therefore who will be dear to such a one must 
himself become such another; and it follows that 
he of us who is temperate is dear to God, being 
like, and the intemperate is unlike and hostile, 
as is the unjust, and so on with the other virtues 
and vices.” 

God the measure of all things. 'That is to say, 
for us God is the measure of conduct, as in the 
creation and conduct of the world he is the source 
and power of measure. So the passage should 
be read in connection with the cosmological specu- 
lation of the Philebus, wherein God is repre- 
sented as the cause which imposes measure and 
limit upon the naturally unlimited. So also it 
falls in with the myth of the Timaeus, wherein 
creation is dramatized as the work of God who, 
in his goodness and freedom from envy, conde- 
scends to the original chaos and fashions it by 
measured and numbered form into a cosmos of 
law and order and beauty. Philosophy in this 
way, without relaxing the rigidity of its author- 
ity, blends with mythology, and religion acquires 
its large scope and magnificent courage. Our 
search for happiness in justice and temperance 
is no longer an isolated act subject to the charge 
of insignificance, but becomes part of the divine 
drama of the world; for by introducing measure 


WORSHIP 287 


into our own unruly members we are imitating 
God and helping in that endless labour of force 
and persuasion by which chaos is kept in bounds. 
“Plato, like Pythagoras,” says one of the com- 
mentators, “made imitation of God the end of 
philosophy, but he gave clarity to the definition 
by adding ‘so far as possible.’ The possibility 
lies only in wisdom, and this is what accords with 
virtue; for in God there is that which fashions 
and governs the world, whereas in the wise man 
there is an appointing of life and an order of 
living.””* 

And man is not left without guidance and 
comfort in the task of bringing measure into his 
life. The world, as Plato believed, was full of 
signs and voices indicating the presence of the 
gods, and in the act of worship man was able to 
draw very close to the divine society. Imme- 
diately after the rule of imitation by measure 
there follows this sentence: “Wherefore let us 
hold to this report (logos) as agreeing with what 
has been said, the fairest and truest, I think, of all 
reports, that to make sacrifice and always to have 
intercourse with the gods by prayer and offering 

4Arius Didymus (?) ap. Stobaeus, Eth. vi, 3: Xwxparns 
TlAdrov raira ta TvOaydpa, réAos opoiwow Geov. capéorepov § 
avto SinpOpwoe TAdrwv rpocbes To xara To Suvarov, ppovyce 5 
hv povus Suvarov, rovto 8 jv To Kat’ dperny’ év piv yap Bea To 
KOT MoToLOY Kal KocpodioiKyTiKoY, év b¢ Te Topw Biov Katacracis 
cat Cwis Staywy7. 


288 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


and all divine service is for the good man the 
fairest and best and most effective instrument of 
the happy life.” Such is the general principle 
of worship, into the details of which, as set forth 
in the sections of the Laws I have translated and 
in other scattered passages, we need not enter. 
But it is important to note that worship for 
Plato had two distinct aspects, the public and the 
private. 

In its outer manifestation, in the act of sacri- 
fice with the attendant ceremonies of procession 
and dance and song and prayer, Plato thought 
of worship as primarily a common possession of 
the people and as a bond of social union in the 
spirit. Always when the forms of worship are 
in question he refers to the Oracle of Delphi as 
the traditional centre of authority. Even the 
veneration of idols could be brought into his 
scheme, though in admitting them he makes a 
plea for a finer reverence of living symbols. 
“Some of the gods [the Sun, etc.] we can see 
with our eyes and so honour,” he says; “but of 
others we set up statues made in their likeness 
and adore these soulless images, believing that 
the living gods are pleased and grateful for our 
homage. Yet, if a man has in his house such 
treasures as a father or a mother or one of an 
earlier generation stricken in years, let him never 

Laws 9314 Suppose that any graven statue will have more 


WORSHIP 289 


authority for him than this image he possesses 
at the hearth of his home, if he serve it duly and 
well.”” ‘So much Plato would grant to the family 
as a smaller community within the larger com- 
munity of the city. But generally he is explicit, 
almost fanatic one might say, in his repudiation 
of anything leaning towards the setting up of 
independent rites. In a beautiful passage of the 
Laws, where directions are given for consecrating 
shrines to the gods and daemons of the various 
tribes of the people, the chief object of worship 
is described as the gathering together of young 
and old at stated periods to the end that by the 
association in sacrifice they may become known 
to one another (“than which no greater good can 
befall a city”), and light rather than darkness 
may reign in the daily intercourse of life. Dis- 
sent, with its bias towards eccentricity and its 
tendency to dissipate reverence in rationalism, 
would have been, and indeed was, abhorrent to 
Plato in allits forms. ‘For you see,” said Socra- 
tes to a young man who was dejected because he 
knew not how to worship the gods acceptably in 
return for their beneficence to men,—‘“you see 
that the god of Delphi, when some one asked him 


5 For a defence of idols, which might be appropriated by any 
sacramentalist, see Maximus Tyrius ii, especially 2 f: Aoxovowv 
5y por Kai of vopobéra, Kabarep Twi maidwy ayéAy, eLevpeiv rots 
avOpwros TavTi Ta dydApata, onpeia THS mpos TO Oeiov Tihs, Kat 
Gomep xetpaywyiav Tiva Kai odov mpos dvauvyyoty. 


738c ff. 


290 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


such a question, replied, “By the law and custom 
of the city,’”* That was the spirit of religion 
which Plato learnt from his master, and to which 
he held through all the years of his life. 

And with this law and custom of the city, 
which should determine for the individual the 
ceremonial rites, went another law, that of tradi- 
tion, which interpreted for him the reason and 
inner meaning of worship. ‘Tradition, report, 
the ancient saying, are for Plato the intimation of 
divine things which was given to men in old days, 
almost by revelation one might say, when life was 
larger and simpler and religious truth was less in- 
volved in the complications of worldly knowledge, 
and when the heroic children of the gods heard 
what they took to be the immediate voice of their 
fathers. ‘This intimation of divine sonship was 
the deposit, kept alive in the obscure conscious- 
ness of the people, handed down and developed 
by a succession of great teachers such as Pythag- 
oras and the earlier theologians of the Bacchic 
and Orphic societies, and proclaimed to the ini- 
tiated in the mysteries. It is not very different 
from the Christian theory of tradition, though 
less precise and dogmatic.’ 

® Nopw roAews, Xenophon, Mem. IV, iii, 16—For the political 
function of worship, see Aristotle, Nic. Eth., VIII, ix, 5. 


7 Plato’s general term for tradition in this sense is maAavos 
Aoyos or madatol Adyou (e. g. Phaedo 70c; Laws 715:, 738c; and 


WORSHIP 291 


But if Plato was a strong upholder of what 
today would be called conformity, believing that 
a certain humble docility of mind was the safest 
attitude in these matters which are revealed to 
us only in hints and symbols and adumbrations, 
it would be a gross mistake to infer therefrom 
that religion for him in any way approached the 
communistic sense of human fellowship as defined 
by Durkheim and other writers of the humani- 
tarian school. Religion, as he thought of it, was 
still the knowledge of a very real God, present 
to the purified human soul, a knowledge confirmed 
and deepened but in no wise created by the com- 
mon consciousness. And however vigorously 
Plato may have announced the claims of tradition 
and the consensus of mankind in questions of 
faith, however ready he may have shown himself 
to worship at the altars of his own people in ac- 
cordance with the law and custom of the city 
where he was born, there was a point at which 


compare Timaeus 40p, Philebus 16c). As an original “deposit,” it 
corresponds to the Christian zapaxata6yxn. As handed down 
from generation to generation, it is the Christian Tapasects 
whether written or oral; thus Basil, De Spiritu Sancto §66: 
Tay év ty ExxAnoia mepvrcypévov Soypdtwy kai knpvypdtov Ta 
pev éx THS eyypador dibacxaXrias Exopuev,7a dé x THs TOY drogToAwy 
mapadocews Siabobevra ypiv év pvotynpiw mapedeedpeba’ amep dy- 
porepa THY avTnv icxdv Exe mpos THY evoeBeay. The succession 
of teachers is the S:ado0x7, for which, with references to the 
corresponding d.ado0x7n Tov diAocddwv, see Essays on Early His- 
tory of the Church, edited by H. B. Swete, pp. 197 ff, 201, 242. 


Gorgias 4728 


4748 


292 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


conformity ceased and the voice of conscience 
made itself heard. So he accepted the traditional 
gods, as manifestations more or less symbolical 
of the obscure daemonic powers working through 
the phenomenal world; but the immoral and un- 
worthy stories attached to these sacred names 
he rejected indignantly. So, too, the foundations 
of religion go down to the instinctive belief of 
mankind in the gods and their providential care, 
striking through the superficial doubts which 
trouble the mind which has begun to think for 
itself. Yet here again the last resort is to the 
individual consciousness; and as Socrates said to 
Polus, so Plato would say to his reader: What 
have we to do with the discordant voices of the 
world? I alone speak to you alone, and unless 
the solitary witness within you confesses to my 
words, I speak to no purpose. This claim Socra- 
tes and Plato make confidently, because they 
know that there is that in all men which answers 
to the truth despite the contradictions of the 
forum and the schools. 

In the formality of worship this line between 
what belongs to the community and what belongs 
to the individual would divide sacrifice from 
prayer. Not absolutely indeed, for prayer was a 
part of the ceremony at the altar and so of the 
public function; but it was more particularly the 
privilege of the individual soul, and no one can 


WORSHIP 293 


go through the Dialogues without being im- 
pressed by the constant references to this act of 
private devotion. Twice Plato gives what he evi- 
dently regarded as the ‘normal form of such 
prayer, once in Second Alcibiades when he quotes 
the public supplication of Lacedaemon as a model 
for the individual, “that the gods would grant 
good things and still what is fair,”* and a second 
time at the close of the Phaedrus, when he en- 
larges this ejaculation into the personal prayer 
of Socrates: 


“Beloved Pan and ye other gods that are here, 
give me beauty in the inward soul, and may the 
outward and the inward man be at one. May I 
hold him rich that is wise, and grant me such a 
quantity of gold as none but the temperate can 
carry.” 


Something yet was needed before the human 
soul could express itself as it was taught to do 
in the Gospel, and Pan and the other gods could 
never be the same to mankind as “Our Father.” 
But the meaning of prayer as Plato set it forth in 
the Second Alcibiades, that it should be a humble 
plea for enlightenment in what we need rather 
than the demand of any particular desire, is sin- 
gularly close to the best spirit of Christianity; and 
the phrase of the Laws, “always to have inter- 
course with the gods by prayer,” became the es- 


8148c: Ta cada émi Tots dyabois Trovs Beors didovac. 


294 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


tablished formula of the finer Platonists and of 
the Fathers. For the former we have the witness 
of Maximus of Tyre: “You indeed think that 
the prayer of the philosopher is to ask for things 
not present, but I say that it is intercourse and 
conversation with the gods concerning things 
present and a manifestation of the soul’s virtue.” 
And Clement of Alexandria was Platonist as 
well as Christian when he declared that “prayer 
is intercourse with God.” 

Religion is thus both public and private, and 
it must ever remain the delicate task of the wor- 
shipper to be diffident of his personal beliefs and 
at the same time to judge for himself between the 
settled deeper conviction and the floating opin- 
ions of mankind. Perhaps there is an unresolved 
paradox in this appeal at once to the individual 
conscience and to common consent; if so it is a 
difficulty not peculiar to Plato but one that has 
persisted to the present day. I should say that 
the fairest example of it in modern times, muta- 
tis mutandis, is the endeavour of the Anglican 

9 Laws 116 v: Upocomreiv det rots Oeots evxats.— Maximus v, 
Sp: Sb pev Hyet THY TOD Pioaddov edynv aityow evar TOY ov 
mapovTwv, ey 5é dutdiay Kal didAexrov mpos Tevs Deovs mepi Tov 
mapovTwy Kal émideréiv THs dperys.—Clement, Strom. VII, vii, 39 ff: 
"Eotw ovv, ds eireiv ToApnpoTepor, SptAta mpos Tov Beor 7 edy7 

. . GAX’ ody ye 6 yyworixos mapa dAov eixerar Tov Biov, bi edyis 
cvveivar pev orevowv Geo x.t.A.—See also Dio Chrysostom ix, 17; 
Origen, De Or. §25; St. Chrysostom, In Rom. 585p ff. 


WORSHIP 295 


profession to hold a middle course between the 
Romanists, who accept absolutely the authority 
of the Church, and the Bible Protestants, who, 
practically, reject such authority for a document 
which each man must interpret for himself. And 
I should venture to assert that, not indeed in all 
dogmas, but in what may be called the éthos of 
religion, no book of theology comes closer to the 
spirit of Platonism than Hooker’s Ecclesiastical 
Polity. It may be irksome to the imperious de- 
mands of the reason to rest in this undetermined 
ground of compromise and adjustment; but so 
it is, in this as in all things else, religion is a part 
of the sense of the divine as a law of measure and 
mediation. 

Possibly the reader, while acknowledging the 
nobility of Plato’s imitation of God, will yet miss 
the one thing that seems to him the very essence 
of the Christian life: “Pure religion and unde- 
filed before God and the Father is this, To visit 
the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and 
to keep himself unspotted from the world.’ 
Now purity from the defilement of the world 
was the aim of the Platonist quite as much as of 
the Christian, but in the other clause of the pre- 
cept there is a tenderness, a beauty of devotion, 
which cannot be found in Platonism. There is 
nowhere in the Dialogues or in the writings of 

10 James i, 27.—See ante, chap. i, note 1. 


296 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


any commentator anything corresponding to the 
conception of imitation which a Christian moral- 
ist could draw from the Gospel: “ ‘Love your 
enemies,’ it is said, ‘bless them that curse you, 
and pray for them which despitefully use you,’ 
and the like; to which it is added, ‘that ye may be 
the children of your Father which is in heaven,’ 
in words that imply the becoming like to God.’”” 

So much, it must be admitted, Christianity 
brought into human life which Plato had not dis- 
covered. And the admission is large. But with- 
al it must not be magnified out of proportion. 
Though paganism at its best fell short of what — 
may be called the sanctity of love, it was not re- 
stricted, as some would have us believe, to a harsh 
and narrow egotism; far from that. Everywhere 
in The Republic and the Laws, to go no further 
afield, the good of the individual is made sub- 
ordinate to the welfare of the State, and the State 
itself is regarded as a kind of fellowship of 
friends, and friendship is glorified as it has rarely 
been in later times. And if Plato did not feel 
quite the broadest philanthropic sympathy, at 
least he was open to the appeal of kinship among 
all Greeks, and the Stoics took but a step further 
in the same direction when they taught that all 
men as the children of God were brothers and 


11 Clement, Stromata IV, xiv, 95. 


WORSHIP 297 


citizens of one city, the world.” Nor in his per- 
sonal ethics did Plato at all overlook the ordinary 
obligations or the tender sentiment of family and 
social life. E:ven the idea of service was not want- 
ing to his outlook. In the allegory of the cave, 
when the prisoner of darkness has thrown off his 
shackles, and has passed upwards to the light and 
the vision of things as they are and to the joyous 
air of liberty, he is not left there in the peaceful 
solitude of emancipation, but is commanded to go 
down again into the shadows and to force into 
dull ears the message of hope. Always the phi- 
losopher, so long as he can make his voice heard 
amidst the hubbub of earthly noises, is a preacher 
among men, a fighter for truth and righteous- 
ness, and a bearer of the burden of human error. 
At times this note in Plato, particularly in that 
allegory of the cave, sounds curiously like the 
“condescension” and the “emptying of himself” 
(the synkatabasis and kendsis of the theologians) 
by which the Son of Man made himself like to 
men that he might raise men to the likeness of 
God. 
Nevertheless Plato’s first interest is in morality 
as something intimate and private to the man 
12 E.g. Epictetus, Discourses I, ix, 1: Ei ratra éeorw adnOn Ta 
mept THs Tvyyevelas TOD Geod Kal avOpdruv Aeyopeva U7 THY GiA- 
odduv, ti dAXo drodcirerat Tois dvOpwros 7) TO TOD Zwxpdrovs, 


pyderore mpos Tov mvOopevov modamds éotwy eimeiv Stu AOnvaios 7) 
Kopiv@.os, aAX’ ote KoopLOs. 


298 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


himself. Even the solidarity of the State is 
taught not so much with a view to the welfare of 
society as with a view to illustrating the unity in 
subordination of the individual soul; and the mis- 
adventures of his political theory spring from his 
occasional forgetfulness that the just organiza- 
tion of the State can be used as a “writing in 
large” of justice in the soul only with such re- 
servations as go with the fact that the unity of 
interest in society as a collection of individual 
souls belongs to an entirely different order from 
the unity of the soul as a complex of “faculties.” 
Always his ethical method, when free of such 
entanglements, is to maintain that inner balance 
and government of character are to be striven for 
first, and that virtuous conduct will follow from 
this inner adjustment automatically. So true is 
this, that if, under untoward circumstances, in- 
ner harmony and public duty should become so 
estranged as to render the pursuit of both at 
once incompatible, he would advise the tormented 
soul to seek purity and peace in retirement from 
the world—an apparent sacrifice of duty only, 
since such withdrawal may yet be the highest 
service. Plato’s ethics of measure and justice is 
certainly individualistic; the question is how far 
in this his philosophy differs from Christianity. 

Now undoubtedly justice and love, taken re- 
spectively as the initiative forces of morality, do 


WORSHIP 299 


lead to profound divergencies in character. Un- 
doubtedly it makes a great difference in religion 
if the God whom we are to imitate is regarded as 
the imposer of measure on the aboriginal chaos, 
though He be actuated by goodness and lack of 
envy, or as one who “so loved the world that He 
gave His only begotten Son.” But it does not 
appear that, religiously considered, one of these 
principles is more intimate, more individualistic, 
so to speak, than the other. As motives they 
agree in this, that both have their original im- 
pulse within; both look primarily to the attain- 
ment of an inner condition, and only secondarily 
to the relations of man with man. For the Chris- 
tian the love of God is the first law, upon which 
the love of man is to follow; and the sacrifice of 
God’s Son was made in order that the individual 
believing soul “might not perish but have everlast- 
ing life.” The private harmony of the man him- 
self with his divine source and end is the primary 
requisite of salvation, and from this spiritual 
atonement the unison and concord of society will 
follow as a natural consequence. 

The serious rift is not between Christianity 
and Platonism, but between the common Greek 
sense of religion as it developed unchanged at 
the core through all the changes of the eight hun- 
dred years from the death of Socrates to the 
death of St. Chrysostom, and as it persisted, 


300 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


though with graver alterations, in the western 
world until a comparatively recent date—the 
great chasm is between that religious spirit and 
the prevailing modern ethics. The difference is 
in the attitude towards the distinctive reality and 
importance of the soul. “For what shall it profit 
a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and 
lose his own soul?’*? That is the Christian note 
that sounds through all the Fathers of the Greek 
period. Clement was faithful to this precept 
when he said that “worship of God for the Gnos- 
tic (the perfect Christian) is the continual study 
of his soul and the occupation with his diviner 
part with unceasing love,” and that “the Gnostic 
is pious in that he cares first for himself, and then 
for his neighbours, in order that we may be made 
virtuous to the uttermost.””* Basil had the same 


13] am aware of the different interpretations put upon this 
text by certain modern exegetes who translate yox7n by “life” 
rather than “soul.” Pfleiderer, for instance (Primitive Chris- 
tianity II, 444), takes the text simply as an exhortation against 
cowardice or disloyalty at the critical moment when Christ was 
about to establish his Messianic kingdom. It may be (though I 
doubt it) that the words as spoken by Jesus had some such 
meaning as this; but certainly they were not so understood by 
the Patristic writers, and by Christianity I mean always the 
developed faith of Clement and Athanasius, the Cappadocians, 
and Chrysostom rather than any conjectural interpretation of the 
Gospel narrative. 

14 Stromata VII, i, 3; iii, 16. Compare also VII, iii, 13 et 
passim. ‘This notion of the higher service almost excludes the 
notion of conscious service. The man who sets out to raise himself 


WORSHIP 301 


text in mind, when he wrote: ‘Wherefore all 
our guard should be upon keeping the soul. 
Herein let us slacken not, nor,for a little ease 
barter our great hopes. What then should we 
do? What else but have the soul in our care, for 
this maintaining leisure from all other things?” 
In the Middle Ages the author of the Imitation 
took the old maxim of Seneca’s so rigorously as 
to render religion almost inhuman: Quoties in- 
ter homines fui, minor homo redii. Plato would 
never have carried the principle of imitation to 
this extreme of asceticism. But for him the sal- 
vation of a man’s own soul was the basis of phi- 
losophy and religion as truly as it was to a St. 
Paul or a Clement or a Basil. To enumerate the 
passages in which he anticipates the doctrine 
would be little less than to give a summary of 
all his Dialogues.” 


deliberately as an example for others, is likely to end as a mere 
prig. The man who sets out to elevate his neighbours without 
elevating himself may become a mere reformer. 

15, Sermo de Legendis Libris Gentilium $82, 6: Aw 8) racy 
prdacy THY Youxyv TnpyT Eov ... . od 89 otv pabvynréov jpiv, 
ovde Tis év Bpaxe p poor dyns peydAas éhmidas avtadAakTéov . 
ti ovv mo@pev; hain tis dv. Ti dAdo ye H THS WuyxAs éryeAeav 
exe, Tacav oXOAHY ard TGV GAAwY ayovtas; See also Letter cexlv: 
Mydev mporiporepov THs GAnGelas Kai THs oikelas EavTdv dodadcias 
TiBéuevor. 

16 Ackermann, in Das Christliche im Plato und in der plato- 
nischen Philosophie, makes much of the doctrine of salvation as 
the bond between Platonism and Christianity. 


302 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Thus the theory of imitation is only an exten- 
sion of Plato’s “philosophy of the soul.” From 
one point of view the office of religion is to draw 
the soul up into likeness of God, from another 
point of view it is to draw the soul away from 
the world; and there may, or may not, be an ele- 
ment of incompatibility in these two processes, 
according as we understand them. In the al- 
legory of the cave the path upwards to the divine 
light of realities is also a way of escape from the 
bondage of ignorance, and in general the Platonic 
philosophy might be defined as a turning of the 
soul away from this shadowy life and an ascent, 
or reascent, to a region of truth far above this 


Republic 5008¢]ouded atmosphere; nor is there any leisure for 


176A 


one who has been so lifted up to look down upon 
the business of this world and to fill his mind 
with the contentions and jealousies of mankind. 
In the same spirit philosophy is regarded as a 
study of death, by which Plato means a weaning 
of the soul from the pleasures and pains of mor- 
tal hfe and a preparation for a time when it shall 
be set free from the prison-house of the body. 
And, again, in the passage of the Theaetetus 
which announces most clearly the doctrine of imi- 
tation, the becoming like to God is said to be a 
flight; for of necessity evils dwell in this our 
mortal nature and in this region of the earth, and 


WORSHIP 303 


our endeavour must be to flee hence to the sphere 
of the gods with all possible speed. 

Now in the simple faith of the Orphic sects 
from whom Plato received the doctrine of imita- 
tion and flight, there is no incompatibility and 
nothing to reconcile. God, they thought, was 
good and the flesh was evil—body is equivalent 
to tomb (sdma-séma) ; the soul of man belongs 
with God, is of God, and only by some unac- 
countable lapse has become immersed in matter, 
from which by ascetic rites and the intoxication 
of ecstasy it may be released and once more re- 
absorbed into its divine source. No causal nexus 
exists between God and the cosmos, no excuse for 
the habitation of the spirit in the flesh, but a 
yawning abyss between two worlds. With such 
a belief, whether held by the ascetic sects of pagan 
Greece or by the later ascetics of Christianity,” 
there is no inconsistency between imitation and 
flight, which are merely the positive and negative 
aspects of one and the same motion of the soul. 

But in Plato’s religion the matter is not so 
simple. However at times he may seem to speak 
the unmitigated language of Orphism, his sober 
theory was of a different hue. If the God of 
the Timaeus is the model of imitation, the God 


17 Absolute asceticism was never the orthodox Christian view 
and indeed could not be held consistently with their theory of 
creation, but it obtained nevertheless largely in practice. 


304 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


who in his goodness and beneficence brings or- 
der and form into the world of phenomena, then 
imitation cannot be by way of turning the back 
absolutely on mortal existence, nor can spiritual 
growth be coincident with escape from respon- 
sibilities: we too have our task and duty here and 
now. Yet in this same dialogue metempsycho- 
sis is presented in such a manner that birth in 
the body would seem to be the consequence of 
some fault in the soul, and the upward path ends 
in an eternal release from the entanglements 
and even the obligations of earthly life. It is not 
easy in such a conception of religion to reconcile 
the acts of imitation and of flight, and I doubt 
whether they ever have been, or can be perfectly 
reconciled, whether we must not be content to 
accept them frankly as they are, each in itself, and 
in practice strike what balance we can. After 
all this is only another aspect of the difficulty in- 
herent in the view of religion as at once public 
and private, communal and individualistic. 

The paradox of such a situation has often been 
stated by religious writers, perhaps nowhere 
much better, or at least more quaintly, than in 
the words of Synesius, the Platonizing Bishop 
of Ptolemais: 


“God has made pleasure to be a kind of clasp 
for the soul, by means of which it endures the 
assiduity of the body. ... Another may say 


WORSHIP 305 


what drink of oblivion there is for the souls that 
have departed, but I know that to the soul that 
has entered life the pleasure and sweetness of this 
world are held forth as a drink of oblivion. For, 
descending to its first life as a voluntary wage- 
earner, it forgets its freedom and becomes a slave. 
Its duty was to offer a certain free service to the 
nature of the world, under the decrees of Neces- 
sity; but, beguiled by material gifts, it suffers 
such a lot as befalls those free men who hire them- 
selves out for a definite time, and then, ensnared 
by the beauty of a maidservant, are willing to 
remain, admitting their slavery to the master of 
their beloved. . . . But those who believe in 
Providence and take heed to themselves, will be 
at once pious and observant of duty; nor will they 
think there is any discord between keeping the 
mind fixed on God and practising virtue.” 


In Plato, as in Synesius, pleasure is the nail, 
or clasp, that fastens the soul to the body, re- 
garded at one time as an association of evil to be 
rent asunder, and at another time as a means of 
discipline in virtue and a field of duty. In Plato 
also men are here as servants of the world, whose 
eyes nevertheless must be turned away from the 
world to God. Nor, I think, do these apparently 
conflicting views represent different stages in Pla- 
to’s growth (though no doubt some change of em- 


18 Dio §6; De Insomn. §5; De Prov. I, §11. The last section, 
from the De Providentia, should be read in full. 


306 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


phasis his view of life did undergo), so much as 
a constant recognition of the fact that religion 
cannot be simplified into a monistic formula. It 
would be a blessed relief from anxiety and hesi- 
tation, if we might conform our conduct to a 
simple metaphysical abstraction, as the pure as- 
cetic or the pure humanitarian or even the honest 
votary of pleasure professes to do; but that is a 
forbidden blessing which the wise man, Christian 
or Platonist, will forgo.” 


19 Baron Friedrich von Hiigel, The Mystical Element of Re- 
ligion II, 127: “The fact is that here, as practically at every chief 
turning-point in ethical and religious philosophy, the movement 
of the specifically Christian life and conviction is not a circle 
round a single centre,—detachment; but an ellipse round two 
centres,—detachment and attachment. And precisely in this 
difficult, but immensely fruitful, oscillation and rhythm between, 
as it were, the two poles of the spiritual life; in this fleeing and 
seeking, in the recollection back and away from the visible (so as 
to allay the dust and fever of growing distraction, and to re- 
harmonize the soul and its new gains according to the intrinsic 
requirements and ideals of the spirit), and in the subsequent, 
renewed immersion in the visible, (in view both of gaining fresh 
concrete stimulation and content for the spiritual life, and of 
gradually shaping and permeating the visible according to and 
with spiritual ends and forces): in this combination, and not in 
either of these two movements taken alone, consists the com- 
pleteness and culmination of Christianity.”—This I take to be an 
excellent statement of the Platonic, as well as the Christian, 
experience of moral detachment and attachment: only with this 
difference, that in Christian mysticism there lurks always the temp- 
tation to forget that the evil of our state is an intrinsic evil, out 
of which we must wring what good we can, and not a necessary 
factor of the good. 


WORSHIP 307 


Above all, however the law of imitation be 
understood, the true Platonist will not fall into 
the sentiment conveyed by the Plotinian consum- 
mation of philosophy in the “flight of the alone 
to the alone.”*’ No doubt the primary meaning 
of “alone” (monos) in Plotinus is still rather 
“separation from the body and the world” than 
“loneliness of spirit”; but already the more mod- 
ern sense of “loneliness” was beginning to en- 
croach on the classical usage, and Lionel Johnson 
was doing no violence to the Neoplatonic tradi- 
tion when he wrote the pathetic lines: 

“Do what thou wilt, thou shalt not so, 
Dark Angel! triumph over me: 
Lonely, unto the lone I go; 

Divine, to the Divinity.” 


Plotinus is the mediating link between Plato 
and modern romanticism; but his mediation is by 
way of a deep perversion. It may be that Plato 
sometimes portrayed the religious life as one of 
isolation; the sentimental luxury of solitude he, 
as a true Greek, would certainly have scorned. 
Nor was there anything of sullen or morose in 
his conception of flight from the world. If the 
Plotinian phrase is to be used at all, it should 
be interpreted in the spirit of one of the Cam- 
bridge divines who contrived to combine with it 
a genuine Christian Platonism: 
20 Ennead VI, ix, 11. 


308 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


“By what hath been said may appear the vast 
difference between the ways of Sin and Holi- 
nesse. Inward distractions and disturbances, 
tribulation and anguish upon every Soul that 
doth evil: But to every man that worketh good, 
glory, honour and peace, inward composednesse 
and tranquillity of spirit, pure and divine joys 
farr excelling all sensual pleasures; in a word, 
true Contentment of spirit and full satisfaction 
in God, whom the pious Soul loves above all 
things, and longs still after a nearer enjoyment of 
him. I shall conclude this Particular with what 
Plotinus concludes his Book, That the life of 
holy and divine men is Aélos avndovos tar Tnde, PUY) 
pdvou mpos povov,a life not touch’t with these van- 
ishing delights of Time, but a flight of the 
Soul alone to God alone.’ 

That is close to the right note of imitation and 
flight; but it needs yet to be modified and sup- 
plemented by what is the very essence of Platon- 
ism, the doctrine of Ideas. 


21 John Smith, True Religion, chap. vi. 


CHAPTER XII 


RELIGIOUS LIFE: THE IDEAL WORLD 


The philosopher, Plato says, is essentially a Republic 475 
philotheamén, one who desires to see the truth set 
forth manifestly before him, as well as to know it. 
Inevitably, by the weight of this desire, the laws 
of justice and temperance and all the other reali- 
ties of the moral life, as these in their purity are 
known to him in the soul, dress themselves out vis- 
ibly, symbolically at least, to what may be called 
the inner eye; they become forms, Ideas, that 
move before his gaze in independent loveliness, 
as objects to be pursued and grasped and taken 
to the heart. His ethical experience transforms 
itself into a world of transcendent images, en- 
dowed with power to draw all men to them by 
their gracious influence. Why not? Shall a man 
say to himself that the vision of justice and beauty 
and the rest of the choir exists only by the fancy 
of his own soul, that he is the creator of these 
divine beings? 'That were a pride, an insolence 
of egotism, that would throw dismay into the 
whole range of morality. So figuratively, and 
still something more than figuratively, Plato’s 
philosophy becomes Ideal, and carries the soul 


309 


310 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


into a realm of its own, which is not of this world. 
The vision of Ideas is like the sight of a foreign 
land after a long sea-voyage, in a vessel tossed 
by the waves and borne over the endless expanse 
of waters. When the coast is first seen afar off, 
through the mist, how mysterious it appears and 
how the heart rejoices! And as we draw near, 
and behold the green slopes and the houses here 
and there, we can hardly believe that these are 
the abodes of men like ourselves, but think they 
must belong to some other-worldly beings whose 
days are filled with happiness and peace. 

But there is something in Plato’s divine realm 
besides Ideas; God is there, and the gods, and 
those who accept the Platonic philosophy without 
acceding wholeheartedly also to his theology have 
made themselves free of the outer court, but have 
not entered into the inner sanctuary of religion. 
Now in the myth of creation, as it is unfolded in 
the Timaeus, God, being good and desiring all 
things to be like him, lays hand upon the brute 
substance of the flux and, so far as its nature will 
submit to force and persuasion, brings it under 
the dominion of law and order and number. He 
is a Demiurge; and, as a painter or sculptor 
works with a model before him, so his eye is fixed 
upon the world of Ideas, and this our world of 
phenomena is fashioned by him as a temporal 
image of an eternal pattern. And in this cosmic 


THE IDEAL WORLD 311 


drama man too plays a part. He has that within 
him which corresponds to the dualism of God and 
Necessity; the soul possesses an authority and 
freedom, as Maximus the Platonist of Tyre ex- 
presses it,” akin to the divine, and at the same 
time it is troubled by passions which are similar 
to the restless motions of unformed matter. By 
reason of this double nature, he is under obliga- 
tion, or at least has the power, to render him- 
self like to God by bringing law and order into 
the unruly members of his own being, as God 
exercises government upon the lawless elements 
of the material world. One may hesitate to say 
whether in this act of self-ordering the soul looks 
upon the Ideas of goodness and beauty and jus- 
tice and all the rest and so becomes good and 
beautiful and just, or by becoming good and 
beautiful and just the soul strengthens its faculty 
of vision so as to behold the spectacle of eternal 
verities; the two processes, perhaps, are rather 
concomitant and mutual than sequent as cause 
and effect. But one may say more certainly that 
at the end, after many lives and repeated lessons, 
the soul may purge itself of its passions so as to 
be raised, like God, into that celestial happiness 
which consists in the unbroken contemplation of 
the perfect and everlasting world of Ideas. 

1 Philosophowmena xiii, 88: Tova’ryv op® xat ro dvOpdrw ri 


Siaywynv Tov Biov, dudiBiov xai Kexpayevnvy Suod eovoia xat 
dvdyky K.T.A. 


312 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


It would be hard to overestimate the distinc- 
tion given to the common conception of imitation 
by Plato’s peculiar doctrine of God and Ideas. 
Platonism may soar into regions dim and remote, 
but it never vanishes away in the abysmal Absolute 
of metaphysics or the equally abysmal Person of 
pantheism. The mythology of the Timaeus has 
room for a world-soul as for the individual souls 
of men, but these are kept forever apart from 
the supreme Deity, while the orb of Ideas, spread 
before the gaze of God and man alike, maintains 
its manifold identity without dissolving into a 
pale abstraction. And with the elimination of 
metaphysics and pantheism the practice of re- 
ligion is saved from one and the other form of 
mysticism, whether it be the effort of a soul to 
lose itself in some ultimate negation of the reason 
or to forget its own personality in ecstatic union 
with God. No doubt to some straining spirits 
this limitation will appear a weakness rather than 
a strength, a derogation at once from the majesty 
of God and the dignity of man. Whether they 
be right or wrong, this, at least, ought to be recog- 
nized as the special note of Platonism, that it 
can rise to a high level of spiritual contemplation 
without abandoning the sense of distinctions. 
And I for my part, weighing as well as I can 
the records of the religious life in the Orient and 
the Occident, am persuaded that pantheism and 


THE IDEAL WORLD 313 


metaphysics are a perversion of spiritual truth 
which can be explained by just that difficulty of 
maintaining distinctions in the dizzy flight of the 
soul upwards. I have come to believe, moreover, 
that the way of mysticism, even when it denotes a 
genuine effort of the spirit and however fine its 
fruits may appear (for there is also a bastard 
mysticism of the senses which masquerades as 
spirituality), is a) way perillous to the soul’s 
health and misses still at the end the balance and 
measure and steadfastness, the tranquil happiness 
in a word, of a sounder religious experience. 
The difference between these two types of 
homoiésis strikes so deep into the whole religious 
life that we may turn aside here to look briefly 
into the history of the matter by way of antici- 
pating what belongs properly to another volume 
of our series. The philosophic basis for mysticism 
was laid by Aristotle; and it ought not to be with- 
out significance that this step was taken by one 
who, however great his services were otherwise to 
scientific philosophy, had less of the religious 
mind than his predecessor. Now Aristotle re- 
pudiated Plato’s scheme of Ideas as existences 
separate from phenomena, and regarded them as 
the forms in, or of, particular objects. With this 
rejection of the Ideal world God was left alone, 
in solitary majesty, one may say, to occupy the 
whole sphere of the divine. And Aristotle did 


314 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


not stop here, but still further altered the con- 
ception of God himself. To Plato the deity, 
as the prototype of all soul, was the self-moving 
power which, not moved from without, was the 
source of all outer motion. Aristotle, not con- 
tent with this halfway position, but yielding to the 
urgent drive of abstract reason, proceeded to de- 
fine God as the wnmoved mover, the absolute 
unity behind the moving diversity of the world. 
As such, deity is beyond space and without feel- 
ing or quality or substance; his activity, perfect 
in itself, is confined to that thedria, as described 
in the famous passage of the Ethics, which is not 
vision of the Ideas, but pure thinking without 
content of thought, a completely abstracted self- 
contemplation. There remains no room for the 
working of Providence or for divine fellowship and 
help; God can be associated with the world, not 
by his voluntary participation in the work of 
creation and government, but only in so far as he 
stands aloof as the absolute end and goal of all 
things, identical thus in a manner with Plato’s 
impersonal Idea of the Good, as that which “be- 
ing desired so imparts motion, and moves all 
other things by means of that which is moved.” 

So it is that the door of philosophy is thrown 
open to mysticism. Enlightenment will be a 
process of raising the soul into likeness to God; 

2 Zeller, Geschichte III, 362 ff. 


THE IDEAL WORLD 315 


but this assimilation to the divine, as it reaches 
its consummation in the so-called Neoplatonism 
of Plotinus, will be sought in ecstatic absorption 
into a superessential impersonal One. 

The link between this metaphysical mysticism 
and Christian mysticism can be found in the 
kind of thought represented by Philo, who, pur- 
posing to interpret the Old Testament in the 
terms of Platonism, was led by his reverence for 
the Jewish tradition to a conception of the deity 
quite alien to Plato. His God might be defined 
as an unstable compound of Aristotle’s Absolute 
and the intensely personal Jehovah of Moses. 
The Ideal world of Plato, losing its eternal inde- 
pendence, is reduced to a plan conceived within 
the divine mind, or to a project thrown out by 
the Creator as the pattern of a material world 
to be fashioned in its likeness. The goal of re- 
ligion will not be fellowship with the gods in con- 
templation of the Ideal world, but a rapture and 
ecstasy in which the soul forgets itself and all 
else in its passionate approach to God alone.* 

In this direction was set the Platonism of the 
early ages. Not entirely indeed; for a few phi- 
losophers can be found among the pagans who 


3 An excellent account of this will be found in Philo’s Contri- 
bution to Religion, by H. A. A. Kennedy, though I should not 
give to the. word “contribution” the meaning given to it by the 
author, ' 


316 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


preserved the genuine tradition, and the Chris- 
tians also, even those of a mystical tendency, 
could satisfy themselves at times with a simpler 
Platonic reading of Paul’s great saying: “We 
look not at the things which are seen, but at the 
things which are not seen: for the things which 
are seen are temporal; but the things which are 
not seen are eternal.”* But in general the philo- 
sophie Christian was carried by his theology to 
waver between a semi-Platonism, as it may be 
called, like that of Philo, and a full-blown Neo- 
platonic mysticism. So at one time Origen de- 
scribes the passage of the soul beyond the mys- 
teries of earth, and beyond the heavens, to the 
vision of the Ideal world as it is in God. “For 
there is in God a treasure of sight much greater 
than the spectacle of earthly or heavenly things. 
... For I am persuaded that beyond those things 
which are seen by the sun and moon, and by the 
choir of the stars, and of the holy angels whom 
God hath made to be ‘spirit and a flaming fire, — 
that beyond these God treasureth and keepeth in 
Himself much greater things, which He shall 
manifest when ‘all the creatures shall be delivered 
from the bondage of corruption into the glorious 
liberty of the children of God.’”” Then at last 


4II Corinthians iv, 18—Compare, e¢.g., Origen Exh. ad Mart. 
§44, One of the finest uses of Platonism that I recall among 
Christian writers is Eusebius’ magnificent eulogy of the Church 
in his sermon at Tyre: Tovovtos 6 péyas K.T.X. 


THE IDEAL WORLD 317 


we shall pass beyond the wisdom of signs and 
figures and attain to the nature of Ideas and to 
the beauty of truth itself.” In like manner 
Clement of Alexandria, referring to Plato’s doc- 
trine of Ideas in the Phaedrus, had declared that 
“the Idea is God’s thought, which Barbarians [1.e. 
Christians] call the Word of God.” And so, he 
argues, giving a new turn to the very language 
of Plato, “if we say there is such a thing as jus- 
tice itself, and beauty itself, and even truth itself, 
we have never yet beheld one of these things with 
the eyes but with the reason, and the Word of 
God says, ‘I am the truth.’ ’” 

From this semi-Platonism it is but a step to a 
complete mysticism, wherein Ideas are forgotten 
in the longing to look upon God Himself, and 
to lose all discrimination in the blinding vision 
of the divine personality. That was the ultimate 
goal for Clement: “Wherefore the gndsis [mys- 
tic intuition] doth easily translate the soul to the 
divine and holy which is akin to it, and by its own 
light conveys a man through the mystic stages, 
until it restores him at last to the supernal place 
of rest, teaching him who is pure in heart to gaze 
upon God, face to face, with perfect science and 
understanding. For in this consisteth the perfec- 
tion of the gnostic soul, that, rising above all 


5 Heh. ad Mart. §13. 
6 Stromata V, iii, 16. 


318 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


purification and service, it should be with God.’ 
With Origen mysticism encroached still further 
on semi-Platonism, and in the writings of the 
pseudo-Dionysius it passed into an extravagance 
beyond which human speech cannot go and retain 
any vestige of meaning. 

And this mysticism, which interpreted Plato’s 
theory of Ideas by St. Paul’s “God shall be all 
in all,” was by no means confined to Alexandria, 
where lay its natural home. In particular it per- 
meated the theology of Augustine, and from him 
spread over the western world. To the African 
saint, who acknowledged but one desire, “to know 
God and the soul, these and nothing more,” it was 
inevitable that Ideas should be inconceivable nasi 
in ipsa mente creatoris. God to him was the only 
substance, the cause of all being, the fountain of 
all forms; and for man the vision and contempla- 
tion of truth meant a return to God—redire ad 
Deum—and nothing more.* 

But if the goal of the Christian mystic was thus 
different from that of the Platonic Idealist, the 
beginning of their paths and the ascent for part 
of the way were much alike, as Clement has 
pointed out in the opening chapter of the 
Stromata and in many other places. For the 


7 Stromata VII, x, 57. 
8 For Augustine’s mystical use of the doctrine of Ideas see 
Loofs, Dogmengeschichte+ 352 ff. 


THE IDEAL WORLD 319 


Christian the start was in faith. Looking upon 
the world about him he saw everywhere hints of 
the ordering intelligence of a spiritual Lord. 
“For the invisible things of Him,” as St. Paul 
declares, “from the creation of the world are 
clearly seen, being understood by the things that 
are made, even His eternal power and Godhead.’” 
This intimation of God in nature, felt in all ages 
by all men if their heart is not hardened, is faith, 
obscure in its origin, uncertain in its inference, 
but sufficient to awaken the soul to the desire of 
truth. Then begins, or should begin, the self- 
instruction of the soul in religion. By study of 
the sacred Scripture, by attention to preaching, 
above all by hearkening reverently to the voice 
of revelation within the breast, faith is clarified 
and confirmed and finally is converted into know- 
ledge (gndsis), which is one with love. The being 
and character of God are no longer conjectured, 
but are known. 

Not unlike this in its early stages is the Pla- 
tonic progress towards Ideas, as expounded in the 
Phaedrus and the Symposium. At each chance 
perception of ordered comeliness that meets us 
in our way through the world, there stirs in the 
soul a dim sense of power, a something whose 
perfection is not of this earth. But to the Pla- 
tonist this first intimation of a superior order of 


® Romans i, 20. 


320 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


things comes not primarily, or perhaps one should 
say not solely, as a revelation of God, but as what 
seems to be an involuntary reminiscence from 
some other time and some other state, when the 
soul, unhampered by the body and in company 
with celestial beings, beheld the pure realities of 
beauty and virtue. Those realities are the Ideas, 
and that other region beyond our time and space 
is the Ideal world, which, since it is not of our 
imagining nor yet is the actuality of our present 
life, can be only a possession of memory. The 
reminiscence of Ideas to the Platonist thus cor- 
responds to the Christian’s rudimentary faith in 
God. 

For most men this memory is an uncertain visi- 
tation, a gleam that breaks suddenly through 
their sense of the solid material world from some 
sphere beyond their guess, and as suddenly van- 
ishes away. However it may have been in an- 
cient times, for us, with our romantic bias, the 
recurrence of the vision is likely to be associated 
oftenest with the spectacle of nature’s still and 
untroubled face—intimations that come to us un- 
bidden and uncontrolled, in seasons of quiet con- 
templation by lake or shadowed mountain slope, 
or where the sea is breaking everlastingly upon 
its shore. 

There is no taking of the kingdom of Ideas by 


THE IDEAL WORLD 321 


violence ;"° yet the business of philosophy and re- 
ligion would be to extend these momentary 
gleams into a continuous light, so that even now, 
so far as may be, the Ideal world shall become the 
luminous reality in which our life is passed. And 
not by dreaming at ease but by taking of pains 
must that illumination be reached, if it be reached 
at all. He who would start out on the path 
should first of all disabuse his mind of a senti- 
mental misapprehension of Platonism which has 
prevailed since the seventeenth century. The er- 
ror, innocent in appearance but fraught with mis- 
chievous consequences, found its most exquisite 
expression in The Retreat of Henry Vaughan: 


“Happy those early dayes! when I 
Shin’d in my Angell-infancy. 

Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 

Or taught my soul to fancy ought 
But a white, celestiall thought, 

When on some gilded Cloud, or flowre 
My gazing soul would dwell an houre, 
And in those weaker glories spy 


10 Synesius, De Providentia ii, 8: ‘Os éxeives, dotis év TH Xopa 
mepysever TA Secxvipeva xa” Exagtov év Taser mpox’rrovta Tov 
maparetagpatos. ei d€ Tis eis THY OKNYAV Elo BiaLorTo, Kal, To AEyo- 
pevov, eis Toto KvvoPOarpilorro, ba Tov mpooxynviov tiv mapa- 
oxevnv dOpoay aracav détav éxoxtedoa, exit rovtov ‘EAAavodixat 
Tovs pactryopopovs omA{ovor—The mpoximrovra of Synesius 
are not precisely the Ideas, but the simile is apt. 


322 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Some shadows of eternity ; 

Before I taught my tongue to wound 
My Conscience with a sinfull sound, 
Or had the black art to dispence 

A sev’rall sinne to ev'ry sence, 

But felt through all this fleshly dresse 
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.’’** 


To Plato this would be a half-truth. For him 
also the soul comes to its birth with intimations 
of immortality, but these are obscured by its 
secular dalliance with pleasure and are further 
darkened at the outset of this earthly existence 
by contact with the flesh; it is the task of a life- 
time, or of many lives, ending only with the con- 
summation of wisdom, to convert such intima- 
tions into knowledge. Not the child but the man 
of tried experience is the true philosopher. The 
way of confirmation is by a double effort which 
may be defined best as attention, or study, and 
purification. 

The veil, Plato would say, which hangs be- 
tween us and the vision of Ideas is let down by 
forgetfulness and sloth.” Hence the first duty 


11 The same thought will be found in Earle’s Character of a 
Child, and is reiterated in Traherne’s Meditations. To the modern 
reader it is familiar from Wordsworth’s Intimations. ‘The last 
line quoted from Vaughan was borrowed from one of Feltham’s 
Resolves (No. lxiv): “The Conscience, the Character of a God 
stampt in it [the soul], doe all prove it a shoot of everlasting- 
nesse.”” 

12 See Politicus 273c and Phaedo 99s. 


THE IDEAL WORLD 323 


of the soul, when it hears the call, is to arouse it- 
self from its lethal state of indolence, and to gird 
itself as for a journey. The philosopher, as a 
lover of wisdom, must be a lover of toil also; the 
path through this Meadow of Calamity and be- 
yond to the serene heights of memory, like the 
fabled road to virtue, is long and uphill, and he 
that undertakes to climb to the summit must be 
ready, as it is quaintly said, with no lame or one- 
legged industry. The mind must be trained as 
well as the body, and what that training embraces 
any one knows who has followed Plato’s theory 
of education. All branches of learning are laid 
under contribution. First the eyes are taught to 
trace the laws working in nature, so as to be able 
to comprehend the Ideal pattern on which it is 
constructed. Particularly the orbits of the stars 
will be as a writing in which the learner can read 
the lessons of philosophy, and, reading, bring 
back the motions of his soul to their pristine regu- 
larity. And always there is this difference be- 
tween the man who contemplates the world as a 
theatre of religion and the scientist only, that for 
the former as the order of phenomena grows 
clearer their reality seems to fade away, while 
more and more they appear as puppets of the in- 
visible Powers that move them hither and thither. 


13 Republic 535p: Up@rov pev, elrov, pidorovia od xwddv det 
> 5 ey 7 , ~ 
elvat Tov aWdpuevov (pirogodias). 


Republic 
475 ff. 


324 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


It was in the spirit of Plato’s Timaeus that a 
later astronomer, Claudius Ptolemaeus, com- 
posed his noble epigram: 


“T know that I am mortal and ephemeral; but 
when I scan the multitudinous circling spirals of 
the stars, no longer do I touch earth with my feet, 
but sit with Zeus himself, and take my fill of the 
ambrosial food of gods.”* 

But these studies, astronomy and the like, 
stand only at the threshold of wisdom, and the 
true science comes with attention to the motions 
of justice and honour and all the choir of virtues, 
and all their opposites, in the human soul. These 
the philosopher will study in the larger outline of 
history, as they affect the destiny of States, and 
then in their influence upon the lives of individual 
men. And always, as a lover of sight (for phi- 
losophy is essentially a desire to see), he will 
strain his inner eye in the darkness, until these 
powers take form and grow radiant and shine out 
in his spiritual heaven like the stars of the firma- 
ment.” 

Attention and study are the dialectic of the 
soul by which it rouses itself from its indolent 
slumber in the senses, from its rhathymia, and 


14J. W. Mackail, Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology 
iv, 32. Compare Timaeus 47a. The Christians also had much to 
say about the ovpavia ypappata, as Origen calls them in an 
eloquent passage (Philocalia xxiii, 20). 

15 See Appendix C. 


THE IDEAL WORLD 325 


converts the transient dream of Ideas into the 
“sober certainty of waking bliss.” Purification 
is in reality the same activity, but regarded ethic- 
ally rather than intellectually; it is the endeavour 
of the soul to shake from itself the dragging mass 
of evil, and to realize what the Christian meant 
when he repeated the Beatitude, “The pure in 
heart shall see God.” Much was made of this 
aspect of Platonism in after times, and the com- 
mentators developed elaborate rules for the life 
of katharsis as a state of mediation between the 
worldly life, with its “political” virtues, and the 
life of pure contemplation. From them it was 
taken up by the so-called Cambridge Platonists 
of the seventeenth century, who sought so to re- 
fine the body by clean and spare living as to ren- 
der it a fit vehicle for a soul intent upon “joying,” 
here and now, “as it were the joy of the soul of the 
universe (gaudere gaudium animae universi).” 
Dr. Henry More knew well, and said, that he 
was repeating the lessons learned from Platonic 
writers when he described the effects of a Chris- 
tian purification: 


“There is a holy Art of Life, or certain sacred 
Method of attaining unto great and Experimen- 
tal Praegustations of the Highest Happiness, 
that our Nature is capable of.... The Degrees 
of Happiness and Perfection in the Soul arise, 
or ascend, according to the Degree of Purity and 


326 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


Perfection in that Body or Matter she is united 
with: So that we are to endeavour a Regress 
from the baser Affections of the Earthly Body; 
to make our Blood and Spirits of a more refined 
Consistency; and to replenish our Inward Man 
with so much larger Draughts of Aetherial or 
Coelestial Matter. ... In the deep and calm 
Mind alone, in a Temper clear and serene, 
such as is purg’d from the Dregs, and devoid of 
the more disorderly Tumults of the Body, doth 
true Wisdom, or genuine Philosophy, as in its 
own proper Tower, securely reside.’”** 

These later writers, no doubt, added a note 
that jars somewhat with the harmonies they bor- 
rowed from the Academy, and this is particularly 
true when they soar into rhapsodies over the 
mystical union with God. But Plato knew the 
meaning of “the cleanness of sweet abstinence,” 
as well as any Christian seer; and at times his 
language takes on the colours of enthusiasm, 
notably in the central passages of the Phaedo, 
where Socrates, speaking with the shadow of 
death upon him, denounces “the pleasures, joys, 
and triumphs of this present life,” as leaden 
weights that hamper the soul in its upward flight. 

The philosophy of purification is in fact only 
another name for the religious flight from the 
world. It is not to be confused with a sullen dis- 


16 Richard Ward, Life of Dr. Henry More, pp. 84, 12, 39, 212, 
ills 


THE IDEAL WORLD 327 


content, nor does it spring from a mere discom- 
fort in the circumstances of life; the divine dis- 
content is of another sort. Clement was true to 
the Platonic tradition when he declared that “the 
aversion for things of the senses would not bring 
as a consequence the feeling of kinship with in- 
telligible Ideas, but on the contrary by this feel- 
ing of kinship the whole being of the lover of 
knowledge suffers a natural revolution away 
from things of the senses.”*’ Yet, if this revolu- 
tion of faith has its root in a positive longing of 
memory,. and is a voluntary turning to the light, 
its first effect is felt rather as a darkening of 
what before stood out in sharp relief. What was 
far becomes clear, and over what was near to the 
senses a veil is drawn, as in a cool night of spring 
one sees a mist thicken over the low-lying valley 
of a stream, while the moon rides above in cloud- 
less splendour, “and the immeasurable heavens 
break open to their highest.” Thus it is with the 
soul’s change of attention; the very globe of this 
earth, which had seemed so solid and so real, 
melts into the insubstantial fabric of a dream, 
and the men move about on it as shadows, and 
this our life, which had so vexed us with its fierce 

17 Stromata IV, xxiii, 148: Ovde pny 9 Tdv ais Onrav droatpody) 
THY Wpos TA voNTa oixEiworv akoAoVOws mrovoin av, Eumarw Se 7 
Tpos TA vonTa oiKEewors KaTa Piow wEeptaywyy TO yywotiKo dd 
Tav aigOnrav yiverat, 

18 Phaedrus 250c: Il00w ray rere. 


328 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


pains and pleasures, fades to an illusion most vain 
and fugitive in the bosom of the infinite illusion— 
une illusion des plus fugitives au sein de Villusion 
infinie.”* 

Illusion: that is the word, the illusion of the 
world and the disillusion of the soul. Few men 
perhaps are capable of a vivid or continuous 
realization of the world of Ideas; that is some- 
thing to wait for and to strive towards. But he 
who does not know by experience the meaning 
of the word illusion, may as well close the books 
of religion and the works of the true poets, as, 
indeed, the secular and narrowly scientific habit 
of mind today is fast closing them. From Pin- 
dar’s “dream of a shadow,” from Shakespeare’s 
“we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and 
our little life is rounded with a sleep,” to Ten- 
nyson’s “watching from a phantom shore .. . the 
phantom walls of this illusion fade”— always this 
thought of the unreality of appearances has hov- 
ered behind the poetic vision of beauty, and has 
become most insistent just when the perception of 
physical loveliness is keenest. The poets speak 
the language of religion, one might say, against 
their will; but with the great orators of the 
Church illusion is the conscious burden of their 


19 Sainte-Beuve’s ejaculation at the conclusion of his long labour 
over Port-Royal. The master knew well, too well, this half of 
the truth. For the distinction between the true and the false 
illusion I may refer to Shelburne Essays I, 122. 


THE IDEAL WORLD 329 


doctrine. So, to take a single example, when 
Eutropius, master of the court at Constantinople, 
fell from power and sought refuge from the Km- 
peror’s rage under the altar of the church he had 
persecuted, Chrysostom, preaching to the people 
with the body of the wretch cowering before them, 
drew this moral from the transitoriness of human 
grandeur: 


“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.’ These are 
the words that should be written up on the walls 
of your houses, and on your very raiment, and 
in the market place and the home and in the 
streets, on your doors and entrances, and before 
all in the conscience of each man, forever in view, 
for meditation and guidance at all times. Be- 
cause the illusion of the world, and its masks and 
acting, seem to many to be the truth, therefore 
I say that these ought to be the words of each 
man to his neighbour daily at meals and when 
two or three meet together, and so he should hear 
from his neighbour—‘vanity of vanities, all is 
vanity.’ ”’” 

Life, the poets would hint and the preachers 
have vigorously affirmed, is inevitably a choice 

20 Charity for the fallen persecutor, courage to face the Em- 
peror’s vengeful wrath, humility in the heart that has seen the 
instability of life, are the lessons enforced by St. Chrysostom in 
what must have been about the most impressive sermon ever 
preached in a Christian pulpit. The sense of earthly illusion was 


often in Chrysostom’s mind, as may be seen, e.g., In Mat. 789n 
and In Eph, 97c. 


330 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


between two interests, or sets of values, one of 
which must fade into unreality as the other grows 
more real. It is one of the constant thoughts of 
Plato that the ordinary man is not really awake, 
but is walking about, like a somnambulist, in pur- 
suit of illusory phantoms. If the dream is mis- 
taken for the reality, as with most of us it hap- 
pens, that is because the passions obscure our 
Republic 586esense of values. “The pleasures that men know 
are mixed with pains—how can they be other- 
wise? For they are mere shadows and painted 
pictures of the true pleasure, and are coloured 
by contrast, which exaggerates both the light and 
the shade, and so implant in the careless mind 
insane desires of themselves; and they are fought 
about, as Stesichorus says the Greeks fought 
about the shadow of Helen at Troy, in ignorance 
of the true Helen.” Against this witchcraft of 
the passions the sentence of philosophy, that only 
Ideas are real, must be repeated by the soul to 
itself as a charm (epdéidé), until the shadows pass 
with the night, and the sun has arisen, and we see 
no longer in signs and symbols, enigmatically, but 
face to face, as the gods see and know. 
Meanwhile what will be the manner of life of 
one to whom not only the palpable objects of 
nature but his own feelings of pleasure and pain 
and the like feelings of all men are a web of il- 
lusion? How shall he live, as live he must, who 


THE IDEAL WORLD 331 


has attained the intuition of religion? “How 
can he whose mind is filled with the majesty of Republic 486s 
philosophy and revels in the vision of all time 
and all being, how can such an one think much 
of human life?” It is clear enough what those 
who walk about in the shadows of time, and to 
whom only that is real which they can grasp with 
their hands and see with their eyes and relish with 
their senses, will make of him. “He who hasphaedrus 249¢ 
broken away from what men commonly take 
seriously and is engaged with the divine, is ral- 
lied by the mass of mankind as mad, since they 
understand not that he is inspired.” Shall he 
not seem demented to those in the dust and heat 
of the fight at Troy, if he tells them that the 
Helen for whom they are clashing their spears 
is only a deceptive image, an eiddlon, while the 
true Helen is not there at all, but safe far away in 
Egypt?— 

“Me Hermes caught away in folds of air, 

And veiled in cloud,—for Zeus forgat me not,— 

And in these halls of Proteus set me down, 

Of all men holding him most continent, 


9921 


That I might keep me pure for Menelaus. 


What the ranks of men think of the philosopher, 
in this sense, we know well enough, as Socrates 
and Plato knew in their day. But how is it with 
himself? Persuaded that life is a play and not 

21 Euripides, Helen 44-48, Way’s translation. 


332 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


the reality, will he withdraw into a contemptuous 
isolation and refuse to enact a part? Must disillu- 
sion be synonymous with indifference? Plato 
has answered this question in what is the ripest 
outcome of his long experience and the last max- 
im of his school: ‘The business of mankind is 
not worthy of great seriousness, yet there is a 
necessity upon us to be serious, and this is our 
misfortune.” 


22 Laws 8038: "Eore 8 Totvyy ta Tov dvOpmrwv mpdypata pe- 
yddys piv orovdys obx dfia, dvayxaidy ye pay arovddlev’ TovTo 
d&  ovx ebrvyés. The context is full of meaning. Com- 
pare also, besides the passages already quoted, Laws 1709a, 
Phaedrus 2772, Republic 5008, 517c, 6048, With these parallels 
before us, it is bewildering to meet a critic (Bruns, Plato’s Ge- 
setze) who rejects the passage in the Laws as an un-Platonic 
interpolation of Philippus. There is an interesting comment on 
the passage in Caird’s Evolution of Theology (1, 159). He quotes 
as follows from Krohn’s Der Platonische Staat: “Here we find 
a great rift in Platonism. It was as the moralizing follower of 
Socrates that Plato drew the first sketch of the ideal State, but 
it is as the metaphysician—who looks beyond the changing ap- 
pearance to the real being of things—that he completes it. These 
two tendencies meet in conflict, yet neither can free itself from 
the other. The reformer, who would heal the disease of his 
people, must believe in the usefulness of his own art; but the 
speculative thinker must contemn the fleeting forms of life in 
view of the substantial reality that underlies them. This rift in 
Platonism is, however, the rift that rends the life of all noble 
spirits. They work in the present with their best energy, yet 
they know that the present is but a fleeting shadow.” That is 
interesting; but I hardly think that “rift” is the right word, nor 
do I believe that Plato’s spirit was exactly “rent,” at least in 
his hours of insight, by what he calls, no doubt, the misfortune 


THE IDEAL WORLD 333 


That is a hard saying, hard to obey and still 
harder to interpret, but it cannot be neglected 
by any one who would understand the practical 
law of the religious life. It contains in germ 
what was afterwards expressed for the Christian 
by the single word apathy (apatheia),”* and with 
this development of the doctrine in mind we may 
perhaps get some inkling of Plato’s meaning. 
Now apathy, as the word implies, is freedom from 
the passions (pathé). The passions are those im- 
pulses of the mind towards something desired or 
away from something undesired, which run to 
excess and surpass the right measure of reason.” 
They are the feelings forced upon the soul against 
its will or admitted by its indolent acquiescence.” 
They are those motions of love and _ hatred, 
pleasure and pain, which trouble mankind by 


of our state. Newman, I take it, came nearer to the true para- 
dox of the spiritual life as Plato felt it, in such sermons as that 
entitled The Greatness and Littleness of Human Life, on which 
Wilfrid Ward has commented worthily in his Last Lectures (p. 
138). 

23 Apathy was the catchword of the Stoics also, from whom, 
more immediately, it was taken over into Christianity, But the 
meaning of the word as it is employed by Christians is far closer 
to the philosophy of Plato than to that of Chrysippus or Epic- 
tetus. 

24 Clement, Stromata II, xiii, 59. 

25 [bid II, xx, 110: “O pév ovv dmAods Aoyos Tis Kab’ yyas 
pirocopias Ta waby mavta évarepeicpata THs Wuyns pyot elva 
THs padOakys kai eikovons Kai olov évarorppayicpuara Tav myev- 
parixav Suvdpewy, mpos as y waAn Hiv. 


334 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


false presentments of reality. More than that: 
they are the failures of the soul to resist a nat- 
ural inclination towards things ephemeral and 
imperfect, even though in themselves innocent, 
and to raise itself to the contemplation of what is 
eternal and divine. The feelings and emotions 
in themselves are not passions, but become pas- 
sions when they are allowed to break into and 
overrun what should be the inviolable stronghold 
of our being. 

So much is clear, that apatheia is not at all the 
“apathy” denoted by its English equivalent. 
There is nothing of sluggishness, or mean indif- 
ference, or brutish insensibility, in the content of 
the Greek word as developed by Christianity 
from the Platonic philosophy. Apathy, so un- 
derstood, in its perfection is the attribute of God, 
who, forever abiding in His own character,” took 
upon Himself the ordering of this world of 
passion and change. And that man is likest God 
who, by learning to know himself, has learned to 
live his own life while bearing the common burden 
of humanity.” “In this way,” says Chrysostom, 

26 Timaeus 42n: *Ev t@ €avTov Kata tporov 7Oet. However 
Plato may distinguish here between God and the lesser gods, and 
however he may speak in the Politicus (272z) of God’s with- 
drawal temporarily from the helm of the world, he never meant 
to deny the reality and continual efficacy of Providence. 

27 Tyabe ceavrdv, To Ta €avTov mparTEv, Kowa Ta TOV Pidrwy, 
the triple thread that runs through The Republic. 


THE IDEAL WORLD 335 


“man becomes like to God, when he suffers noth- 
ing from those who would do him wrong, feeling 
no insult when insulted, or blows when beaten, or 
ridicule when ridiculed.”* More than that: we 
are saved by a profounder law of apathy, “being 
saved by the passions of the passionless Christ.” 

So perhaps we may understand the hard say- 
ing of Plato. Into the midst of the seductions 
of indolence and ignorance comes the terrible 
word of philosophy, that in all the business of 
mankind there is nothing to be taken seriously, 
yet we as men must be serious. Somehow we 
must be engaged in a battle whose issues are not 
ours, partners in a play whose prizes we con- 
temn, in the world yet not of it, moved by sym- 
pathies which yet leave some part of the soul un- 
moved. He who has learned this secret is, as Plato 
says, autarkés, sufficient unto himself whether 
fortune smile or frown, and a citizen of the State 
though his privacy remains untouched. Like 
Hamlet’s friend he “is not passion’s slave,” but 
bears himself “as one, in suffering all, that suffers 
nothing.” This is a paradox which definitions 
will not define; but in the 4 pology and Crito and 
Phaedo it has been clothed by Plato in flesh and 
blood. In the imperturbable calm and the hu- 

28In Rom, 453a. 


29 Gregory Nazianzen, Or. Theol. iv, 5: IpooeAnppévor kat 
verwopévor Tois TOU amabots mabeow. 


336 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


manity of Socrates we may see the most finished 
model of the apathetic man as conceived by phi- 
losophy. 

No doubt, as we know this human life, what 
wisdom can bestow must be taken largely as a 
liberation of hope, and it is our misfortune that 
religion implies a voluntary, or, if not voluntary, 
then an enforced lingering in the shadows of the 
cave. Such is the mysterious law of our exist- 
ence. But even now there is something more than 
this, and apathy may be consistent with an inner 
peace of spirit very near to the purest elation. 
And this follows because, as a man frees himself 
from the servitude of pleasure and its associate 
pain, and makes himself master of his soul, an- 
other range of feeling opens within him, reaching 
upwards to a happiness of which pleasure is only 
a clumsy simulacrum. Everywhere, with endless 
reiteration, Plato upholds happiness (eudaimo- 
nia) as the end of religion and the immediate 
possession of philosophy; and he takes pains, in 
the Philebus, to reject the state of pure know- 
ledge without feeling or personal consciousness, 
were such a state conceivable, as the swmmum 
bonum. Philosophy is something more than a 
cold and benumbing relief from the disappoint- 
ments and tragic inadequacies that are the in- 
evitable portion of a life transitory itself in a 
world of ceaseless transition. It is not a little 


THE IDEAL WORLD 337 


thing, when what the heart desired falls away, 
and what was unloved endures, and all our 
boasted skill brings forth the fruits of folly, to 
hear that our troubles are but “the fierce vexation 
of a dream.” It is much, through these clouds 
that change in a moment from fair to ugly and 
from ugly to fair, to have caught glimpses, 
though it be darkly and in symbols, of a justice 
and a beauty and a goodness which are fixed be- 
yond the turnings of mutability. And after 
many lives, or few, some time, if we persist in 
the right path and refuse to take the shadows for 
substance, we shall come where all the riddles are 
read, and what we have guessed we shall know, 
and what we have believed we shall see. Then 
indeed we shall be like the gods, and shall live 
with them, and with the spirits of just men made 
perfect, a full life in the contemplation and en- 
joyment of everlasting realities. 

Plotinus, as I have insisted and shall have to 
insist again, lost sight of the true divinity of 
Plato when he set up an all-engulfing abstract 
Unity in place of a personal God and Ideas; but 
there is the ring of right Platonism, though the 
overtones may be borrowed from Christianity, in 
the oracle given to a friend, after Plotinus’ death, 
who inquired where his soul might be. I quote 
the exquisite translation of F. W. M. Myers: 


338 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


“Pure spirit—once a man—pure spirits now 
Greet thee rejoicing, and of these art thou; 
Not vainly was thy whole soul alway bent 
With one same battle and one the same intent 
Through eddying cloud and earth’s bewildering roar 
To win her bright way to that stainless shore. 
Ay, ‘mid the salt spume of this troublous sea, 
This death in life, this sick perplexity, 
Oft on thy struggle through the obscure unrest 
A revelation opened from the Blest— 
Showed close at hand the goal thy hope would win, 
Heaven’s kingdom round thee and thy God within. 
So sure a help the eternal Guardians gave, 
From life’s confusion so were strong to save, 
Upheld thy wandering steps that sought the day 
And set them steadfast on the heavenly way. 
Nor quite even here on thy broad brows was shed 
The sleep which shrouds the living, who are dead; 
Once by God’s grace was from thine eyes unfurled 
This veil that screens the immense and whirling 

world, 
Once, while the spheres around thee in music ran, 
Was very Beauty manifest to man;— 
Ah, once to have seen her, once to have known her 
there, 

For speech too sweet, for earth too heavenly fair! 
But now the tomb where long thy soul had lain 
Bursts, and thy tabernacle is rent in twain; 
Now from about thee, in thy new home above, 
Has perished all but life, and all but love,— 
And on all lives and on all loves outpoured 


THE IDEAL WORLD 339 


Free grace and full, a Spirit from the Lord, 

High in that heaven whose windless vaults enfold 

Just men made perfect, and an age all gold. 

Thine own Pythagoras is with thee there, 

And sacred Plato in the sacred air, 

And whoso followed, and all high hearts that knew 

In death’s despite what deathless Love can do. 

To God’s right hand they have scaled the starry 
way— 

Pure spirits these, thy spirit pure as they. 

Ah saint! how many and many an anguish past, 

To how fair haven art thou come at last! 

On thy meek head what Powers their blessing pour, 

Filled full with light, and rich for evermore!” 


So far as we know, this was the last regular 
utterance of the oracular god whom Socrates had 
served and who had pronounced him the wisest 
of men. Apollo’s words will convey to some the 
simple hope of a childlike superstition, to others 
the enigma of hardly attained truth. “Such I 
know the god to be,” said Sophocles in one of 
his lost dramas, “‘to the wise ever a riddler of 
oracles, to the unreasoning a teacher of lessons 
lightly learned and lightly held.” 


THE END 


APPENDIX A 


Certain critics of my Platonism have objected to this 
distinction between “philosophy” and “metaphysics.” 
So far as the question is confined to linguistic usage 
they may be right, for all metaphysicians would lay 
claim to the title of philosophers. But the observance 
of a radical difference between what I mean by philoso- 
phy and by metaphysics, despite the fact that there may 
be, as in all such differentiations, a middle point at 
which they seem to merge together, I hold to be a prime 
requisite for clear thinking. And I do not know of any 
better words to denote this difference. The boundary 
between one and the other is passed when the reasoner 
is no longer satisfied to accept the data of human 
experience as these come to us in their paradoxical form, 
but presumes to rationalize the ultimate how and where- 
fore of things. Thus, Huxley was indulging in vain 
metaphysics when, admitting one set of facts and, in the 
name of reason, rejecting another set of facts, he re- 
duced the world to an absolute mechanism. And ‘the 
Bergsonians are equally metaphysical when, by a pro- 
cess of selection and rejection exactly contrary to 
Huxley’s, they expound their theory of absolute spon- 
taneity. As Luther, the sturdiest opponent of Aristo- 
telian and medieval metaphysics, well said: “Cur” et 
““quomodo”’ exitiales voculae. It would need another 
Luther to cleanse the modern college halls of miscalled 


340 


APPENDIX A 341 


philosophy. Meanwhile some notion of the distinction 
between philosophy and metaphysics, and some notion 
also of the utterly wrong deductions to be drawn from 
the distinction, may be gained from a glance at Prof. 
John Dewey’s recent book on Reconstruction in Phi- 
losophy (New York, 1920). 

Now Mr. Dewey is a moralist, but he is a modernist 
also, and as such is obliged to show that wisdom was 
born yesterday. “Ethical theory ever since [its begin- 
ning in Greece] has been singularly hypnotized by the 
notion that its business is to discover some final end or 
good or some ultimate and supreme law. This is the 
common element among the diversity of theories.” And 
this common element, in Mr. Dewey’s eyes, is more per- 
nicious than the diversity; for it has been nothing but 
an attempt to justify and support the success of the 
predaceous by sanctifying custom in the name of ab- 
stract law and right. Hence he runs amuck through 
the history of philosophy; there shall be no swmmuwm 
bonum, no telos, no abstract principle for him, and woe 
to the upholders of such. 

In one respect a Platonist will be with Mr. Dewey. 
In his onslaught upon the quibbling that goes on in the 
name of philosophy, the “‘vain metaphysics and idle epis- 
temology” that waste the breath of teachers and be- 
fuddle the brains of students, he is doing good and 
valiant service. William James pointed the way when 
he declared that our first task was to “short-circuit” 
the whole business of German metaphysics since Kant. 
But Mr. Dewey is mistaken in his supposition that 
such a distinction between a genuine philosophy and a 


342 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


verbal metaphysic began with modern pragmatism or, 
by a gracious inclusion, with Bacon. And he is a little 
presumptuous, to say the least, when he assumes that 
all the idealistic philosophy of the world has been a 
grovelling effort to shirk the present living actualities. 
“To Plato,” he says, “experience meant enslavement to 
the past, to custom.” All his striving “was the activity 
of an army forever marking time and never going any- 
where” ; all his fine words mere buzzing in a metaphysical 
vacuum. A better knowledge of history and a modicum 
of modesty would have taught Mr. Dewey that Plato, 
the typical idealist and the greatest of the school, was 
as bitterly antagonistic to “vain metaphysics and idle 
epistemology’’—eristic he called them—as is any “up- 
to-date” pragmatist or “‘new realist”; he was in a sense 
the first of all pragmatists. He too insisted, as does Mr. 
Dewey, in season and out of season on the need of keep- 
ing close to experience and of testing all apparent truths 
by their results; only he thought that the highest and 
most significant and most veracious experience was of 
a kind which Mr. Dewey refuses to recognize. He be- 
lieved that it was the office of philosophy to discipline 
the character, to adjust the perception of values, to 
open the inner eye upon what was actually going on 
in the soul, to lift this troubled and interrupted life 
here and now, so far as might be, into a sphere of larger 
and more permanent and more joyous activities. All 
of which to Mr. Dewey is merely marking time and go- 
ing nowhere. 

And Mr. Dewey is equally mistaken in supposing 
that in tearing down the standard of historic idealism 


APPENDIX A 343 


he is not himself bowing down to another standard in 
its place. Every situation, he says, shall be judged in 
and for itself without reference to any standard, ‘“Con- 
firmation, corroboration, verification, lie in works, con- 
sequences. Handsome is that handsome does... . There 
are conflicting desires and alternative goods. What is 
needed is to find the right course of action, the right 
good.” Excellently well said; but will Mr. Dewey tell 
us what he means by handsome? Will he tell us how 
any man is to decide which is the right course of action 
and the right good unless he has some standard by 
which he tests and measures what is right? Beat about 
the bush as one will, that test and measure of rightness 
is one’s “final end.” And indeed Mr. Dewey has his 
standard as absolute and rigid as that set up by any of 
his detested predecessors, only it is a different stan- 
dard from that which has been most honoured in the 
past, and he is trying to throw dust in our eyes by de- 
nouncing all absolutes together. He is one of those to 
whom, as Plato expressed it, nothing is true which can- 
not be weighed in the hands and grasped by the teeth. 
The only solid facts are those which come to the car- 
penter and the smith and the plowman at their daily 
tasks, and in such facts is the foundation of all science. 
The world’s long tradition of spiritual emotions and 
conquests, theology’s peace of God and philosophy’s 
comfort of things unseen,—these are miserable illusions. 
All the professions of saint and sage to clarify and 
confirm these experiences have been the lying words of 
men who sought to escape responsibility and to find 
excuses for the greed of tyrants and the suffocating 


344 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


oppression of institutions. It is pretty clear that the 
modern pragmatic distinction between philosophy and 
metaphysics is not the distinction which belongs to the 
Greek Tradition. 


APPENDIX B 


Plato’s final argument for the immortality of the 
soul and for the being of God is pragmatic,’ but his 
pragmatism is of an order different in kind from the 
als-ob (“as-if”) variety deduced from the Kantian meta- 
physics. This distinction I hold to be of supreme im- 
portance. The als-ob pragmatism itself is so well stated, 
and, as I think, so wrongly identified with the Platonic 
pragmatism, by Prof. J. A. Stewart in the Introduction 
to his Myths of Plato, that I take the liberty of quoting 
a page or two therefrom: 

“The Categories of the Understanding [e.g. sub- 
stance, causation] are so many conditions of thought 
which Human Understanding, constituted as it is, ex- 
pects to find, and does find, fully satisfied in the details 
of sensible experience. The Ideas of Reason [the im- 
mortal soul, an intelligible cosmos, God] indicate the 
presence of a condition of thought which is not satis- 
fied in any particular item of experience. They are 
aspirations or ideals expressing that nisus after fuller 
and fuller comprehension of conditions, wider and wider 
correspondence with environment—in short, that nisus 
after Life, and faith in it as good, without which man 
would not will to pursue the experience rendered pos- 
sible in detail by the Categories. But although there 

1For another aspect of the Platonic pragmatism I commend 


to the reader’s notice Charles P. Parker’s contribution, at once 
amusing and profound, to Harvard Essays on Classical Subjects. 


345 


346 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


can be no speculative science of objects answering to 
the Ideas of Reason, we should come to naught if we did 
not act as if there were such objects; and any repre- 
sentation of objects answering to these Ideas which does 
not invite exposure by pretending to scientific rank is 
valuable as helping us to ‘act as if.’ The objects of 
these Ideas are objects, not for science, but for faith. 
When the scientific understanding ‘proves’ that God 
exists, or that the Soul is immortal, refutation les near 
at hand; but the ‘as if? of the moral agent rests on a 
sure foundation. 

“To return now from Kant to Plato:—Plato’s Myths 
induce and regulate Transcendental Feeling for the 
service of conduct and knowledge by setting forth the 
a priori conditions of conduct and knowledge—that is, 
(1) by representing certain ideals or presuppositions 
in concrete form—the presuppositions of an immortal 
Soul, of an intelligible Cosmos, and of a wise and good 
God—all three being natural expressions of the sweet 
hope in the faith of which man lives and struggles on 
and on; and (2) by tracing to their origin in the wis- 
dom and goodness of God, and the constitution of the 
Cosmos, certain habitudes or faculties (categories and 
virtues), belonging to the make of man’s intellectual and 
moral nature, which prescribe the various modes in 
which he must order in detail the life which his faith or 
sweet hope impels him to maintain. Myth, not argu- 
mentative conversation, is rightly chosen by Plato as 
the vehicle of exposition when he deals with a priori 
conditions of conduct and knowledge, whether they be 
ideals or faculties. When a man asks himself, as he 


APPENDIX B 347 


must, for the reason of the hope in which he struggles 
on in the ways prescribed by his faculties, he is fain to 
answer—‘Because I am an immortal Soul, created with 
these faculties by a wise and good God, under whose 
government I live in a Universe which is His finished 
work.’ This answer, according to Plato, as I read him, 
is the natural and legitimate expression of the ‘sweet 
hope which guides the wayward thought of mortal 
man’; and the expression reacts on—gives strength and 
steadiness to—that which it expresses. It is a ‘true 
answer’ in the sense that man’s life would come to 
naught if he did not act and think as if it were true.” 

Now, with all due deference to so excellent a scholar 
as Professor Stewart, is there not here a deplorable 
confusion of two contrary methods of philosophizing? 
Kant first proves that the existence of God cannot be 
established by reason (so far Plato perhaps might con- 
cur). He next leaves morality dependent upon the 
existence of God as a regulative ideal; that is, our 
morality depends on acting as if God existed (here 
Plato would dissent violently). He then essays to lift 
himself by his bootstraps, as the vulgar have it, ar- 
guing that this as-if must be a fact because we act as 
if it were a fact (here certainly Plato would detect a 
fallacy). 

The gist of the matter is in a sentence of Caird’s 
quoted by Professor Stewart: “Lastly, the Absolute 
Being was to theoretic reason a mere ideal which 
knowledge could not realize; but now His existence is 
certified to us as the necessary condition of the pos- 
sibility of the object of a Will determined by the moral 


348 THE RELIGION OF PLA'TO 


law. Thus, through practical reason we gain a con- 
viction of the reality of objects corresponding to the 
three Ideas of Pure Reason.” ‘This surely is to argue in 
a circle, whereas Plato’s argument proceeds in a straight 
line. If the hypothesis of Republic ii means anything, 
it must mean that the Ideas of God and the soul and 
the cosmos are not the necessary condition of our 
knowing and following the moral law, but that this law 
is something which we discover by direct and imme- 
diate experience. Plato then, book x, proceeds to the 
belief in God and the immortal soul, not as a condition 
of the moral facts, but as a corollary of those facts. It 
is natural to assume that there is in the world at large 
a power corresponding to the moral law we have dis- 
covered in our personal experience, and that this power 
is akin to the soul of man in whom the law works. This 
probability is so strong that Plato accepts it as a truth 
not reasonably to be questioned, as a truth, indeed, 
which the human race has always accepted. It has 
too a pragmatical warrant in the larger religious ex- 
perience, which is something more than mere morality ; 
but, again, the law of morality is not conditioned upon 
such a belief. 

The als-ob philosophy in actual practice is suicidal. 
The Idea of God is merely regulative; we cannot be 
sure of the existence of God, but, in order to act in a 
certain way, we must suppose that he exists. But, the 
moment reason has dispelled the illusion of God’s real 
existence, a man will say: ‘“‘Why must I act as if God 
existed?”? So we reach precisely the position of Pro- 
tagoras (“as to the gods we do not know whether they 


APPENDIX B 349 


exist or not’), and make man the measure of all things 
after the manner of the sophists against whom Socrates 
and Plato spent their energy. As a matter of fact 
the als-ob philosophy of Vaihinger and the immoralism 
of Nietzsche are the twin offspring of the Kantian meta- 
physics, just as the brutal cynicism of Callicles and 
Thrasymachus was twin brother to the philosophy of 
Protagoras. 


APPENDIX C 


Cardinal Newman, in a famous passage (Idea of a 
University 514), has described the coming and going 
of the vision of Ideas in language exquisitely chosen to 
blend the faith of a Christian with the philosophy of a 
Platonist: 

“The physical nature lies before us, patent to the 
sight, ready to the touch, appealing to the senses in so 
unequivocal a way that the science which is founded 
upon it is as real to us as the fact of our personal 
existence. But the phenomena, which are the basis of 
morals and Religion, have nothing of this luminous evi- 
dence. Instead of being obtruded upon our notice, so 
that we cannot possibly overlook them, they are the 
dictates either of Conscience or of Faith. They are 
faint shadows and tracings, certain indeed, but delicate, 
fragile, and almost evanescent, which the mind recog- 
nizes at one time, not at another,—discerns when it is 
calm, loses when it is in agitation. The reflection of 
sky and mountains in the lake is a proof that sky and 
mountains are around it, but the twilight, or the mist, 
or the sudden storm hurries away the beautiful image, 
which leaves behind it no memorial of what it was. 
Something like this are the Moral Law and the in- 
formations of Faith, as they present themselves to in- 
dividual minds. Who can deny the existence of Con- 
science? who does not feel the force of its injunctions? 
but how dim is the illumination in which it is invested, 


350 


APPENDIX C 351 


and how feeble its influence, compared with that evi- 
dence of sight and touch which is the foundation of 
Physical Science! How easily can we be talked out of 
our clearest views of duty! how does this or that moral 
precept crumble into nothing when we rudely handle it! 
how does the fear of sin pass off from us, as quickly as 
the glow of modesty dies away from the countenance! 
and then we say, ‘It is all superstition.” However, after 
a time we look round, and then to our surprise we see, 
as before, the same law of duty, the same moral pre- 
cepts, the same protests against sin, appearing over 
against us, in their old places, as if they never had been 
brushed away, like the divine handwriting upon the wall 
at the banquet. Then perhaps we approach them 
rudely, and inspect them irreverently, and accost them 
sceptically, and away they go again, like so many 
spectres,—shining in their cold beauty, but not pre- 
senting themselves bodily to us, for our inspection, so 
to say, of their hands and their feet. And thus these 
awful, supernatural, bright, majestic, delicate appari- 
tions, much as we may in our hearts acknowledge their 
sovereignty, are no match as a foundation of Science 
for the hard, palpable, material facts which make up 
the province of Physics.” 

Dr. Sanday, following the track of William James, 
has usurped the jargon of modern psychology for the 
same notion: 

“All these things are latent. The door of that 
treasure-house, which is also a workshop, is locked, 
so far as the conscious personality is concerned. For 
there is no ‘harrowing of hell,’ no triumphant descent 


352 THE RELIGION OF PLATO 


into the nether world, followed by a release and return 
of captives on any large scale. The door is locked 
against any such violent irruption. And yet, in some 
strange way, there seem to be open chinks and crevices 
through which there is a constant coming and going, 
denizens or manufactured products of the lower world 
returning to the upper air of consciousness and once 
more entering into the train and sequence of what we 
call active life, though indeed the invisible processes of 
this life are just as active as the visible.” (Ancient and 
Modern Christologies 143.) 


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